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4.3 Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
4.3.1 Introduction
Depending on some quality factors of a web page, between 40% and 80% of the visitors come from a search engine. The rest of them find the way to a web page through other channels like links on other pages or direct entries. General speaking, the better the content of a web page is and the more known a brand is, the more visitors come from above-named sources, because a direct entry or a click on a link always implies that the web page is already known or was already recommended by someone. However, a well-planned search engine marketing strategy is one of the most important factors to have success on the internet (Heise, 2006).
SEM is divided into two parts: Search engine advertising (SEA) and search engine optimisation (SEO). The main difference between these two online-marketing disciplines is that SEA uses paid adverts apart from normal search engine results and SEO tries to optimise a web page to rank. In Germany Google has a market share of about 90%, therefore it is the most important search engine and most of the strengths of an online marketer are to get good results only in Google. This is valid not only for the discipline of SEO, but also for SEA. However, Bing and Yahoo should not be forgotten, although they only have a market share of 5% each (Webhits, 2010). There are slight differences in how these three market leaders assess a web page, but the main points are the same, so this chapter mainly covers Google. If you rank in Google well, this strategy would work with the other search engines as well.