Online search engine marketing or SEM is simply Internet marketing meant to make various web sites known. The purpose of this type of marketing is to make sites visible or noticeable in search engine result pages, preferably by placing the websites as high as possible in rankings. The methods that online search engine marketing resorts to are paid placement or PPC, advertising in context and paid inclusion. In addition, the pay per click system also means that search engine optimization is carried out but SEO is considered to be a different aspect not directly related to online search engine marketing. According to the New York Times our term refers to paying in order to be listed in a search result.

Taking each method one by one will better clarify what online search engine marketing is. First of all, there is pay per click or PPC , a sort of advertising carried out on search engines, blogs, advertising networks or various web sites regardless of content, in which advertisers pay the site that hosts the ad only when the ad gets clicked. With search engines it is a little different because this time online search engine marketing specialists need to select and bid on keywords that are most likely to be used by their target consumers. The smart thing with PPC is that the ad will be displayed on a content site when there is a certain match between the keyword of the advertiser and the one in the query made by the searcher.

Next comes contextual advertising as another product or method of online search engine marketing. To understand it better we have to imagine having a frame within another frame. This is explained by specialists as some type of advertising targeted at advertisements themselves. It means that there is a system that will identify keywords in the content of the web site accessed by the user and, based on those keywords, relevant advertisements will be displayed. So, based on the larger frame, we have another frame, that will actually present its content as the actual Internet site that you, as a potential consumer, are to get to eventually.

The last but not least important method of online search engine marketing is paid inclusion. In this case, the company that owns the web site has to pay a certain fee in order to be included by search engines in their indexes and one such search engine is Google.