Search engine optimization and marketing

SEM

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization efficiently increases your website's visibility on the Internet. Our search engine marketing firm believes that everybody's business is our business. At Comet, we use innovative "White Hat" search engine marketing techniques to drive an immense amount of traffic to your site. The secret to search engine optimization is timing. Our Search Engine Marketing firm, simply knows what to optimize, when to optimize it, and how to optimize the things necessary to achieve high search engine rankings for our customers.

Now you say: "Great, but what do you actually do?" Good question. Let us start off by saying: Search engine optimization involves many individual parts. First, there is the basic business of showing up in the middle of the page when someone searches for something and that is called: 'Natural Search Engine Optimization'.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization explained simply! Here's a little SEO 101 for everyone. SEO is the art of aligning a website's attributes to the algorithms of the search engines. Simply put: we make your website's presence known to the engines as the most sensible and logical choice to the search query at hand. We do this by reorganizing your site's HTML (coding) and content. Oh and yes: CONTENT IS STILL KING!

Once we've completed the Optimization of the coding, we make your site win the search engines' popularity contests by building inbound articles, blogs, and forum postings about your company's attributes. This does two things: A) it lets the search engines know that you are the most authoritative site on the web for the keyword phrase and therefore you should be ranked very high (RANKINGS!) and B) it puts links all over the web in strategic places that entice viewers to visit your site (TRAFFIC!).

Now to the nitty-gritty... Use our menus to find a list of the search engine optimization services and functions Comet offers. Some services are self-explanatory while others require a verbal explanation. Read about the various services we offer and when you stumble on a point that requires more explanation, give us a call: (212) 317-1947. Heck, just give us a call and we will save you the trouble of reading the entire site.

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, SEM methods include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1] Other sources, including the New York Times, define SEM as the practice of buying paid search listings.
Market structure
In 2006, North American advertisers spent US$9.4 billion on search engine marketing, a 62% increase over the prior year and a 750% increase over the 2002 year. The largest SEM vendors are Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.[1] As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.
History
As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text[4] in 1996 and then Goto.com[5] in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name[6] to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers[7] for search engines.
Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001[8] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.
Ethical questions
Paid search advertising has not been without controversy, and the issue of how search engines present advertising on their search result pages has been the target of a series of studies and reports[9][10][11] by Consumer Reports WebWatch. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter[12] in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.
Vested interests appear to use the expression SEM to mean exclusively Pay per click advertising to the extent that the wider advertising and marketing community have accepted this narrow definition. Such usage excludes the wider search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of SEM.