Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

While SEO makes your site more internally available to search engines, SEM actually promotes the external visibility of your site on the Internet. It's a complicated endeavor, however -- just consider this representation of search engine interconnectivity from BruceClay.com:

What this shows is that Google, Yahoo, and Ask provide search results to all the other search engines, except MSN (which is considered a "secondary" engine). The red arrows indicate natural search engine results, whereas the yellow arrows indicate that someone has paid for preferential inclusion in search results provided by that search engine.

Search Engine Marketing generally includes everything from submitting your site's URL to the major search engines, to paying for online advertising and directory inclusion. As part of our basic SEM services, Southborough Website Design will submit your website to primary and secondary search engines and follow up to check that your site is indexed. As part of our premium SEM services, we will submit your site name and summary information to online "yellow pages" type directories. We can also help you apply for listing in relevant professional organizations, and regional business and state directories.

Establishing links to and from other websites is helpful in terms of SEM, but only if the links are related to your site in a significant way. Just having a lot of links isn't going to make your site more attractive to search engines. Consider forming link relationships between your site and those of your vendors, distributors, and other businesses with whom you have meaningful connections and whose website content supports your website content.