Search engine marketing, or SEM, differs from search engine optimization, or SEO, mainly in the  methods utilized for it.

SEM can include: search engine optimization (or SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

Using Internet marketing and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies to advertise your business is very advantageous in many ways.

According to a 2008 iProspect research study, 39% of search engine users believe that the companies appearing in top search results for their field are also the leaders in that field.

Local search marketing has another couple of advantages.

Local search marketing is done by submitting business details to a database of local business listings.  This enables you to reach users who use specialized Internet search engines. Local search marketing allows businesses to efficiently and effectively target local consumers.

One huge advantage of search engine marketing is the ability to cost-effectively advertise round-the-clock, 24-7. Search engine marketing is a low cost advertising strategy, which is easily tracked. It ’s the backbone of any company’s Internet marketing arsenal, especially in a competitive marketplace.

If we truly are experiencing a recession, one way to combat it is by implementing a carefully planned search engine marketing campaign.

One of the things you’ll need, if you decide to build your own website, is some type of grapics program for modifying pictures, creating headers and any number of other tasks you’ll run into.

Graphics programs are costly.  The most widely known and used program is Adobe Photoshop.

There are lots of online tutorials for it and so you can learn to use it but the learning curve is huge.  You’ll spend lots of time figuring out how to perform various tasks associated with it.

I’ve used Photoshop many times for my own work but never had a grasp of more than about 2% of what it’s capable of doing because I just don’t have the time to go through the extreme learning curve that’s required to master the program.

Compartively, there is a program called GimpShop that is free.  You can ‘t argue with that cost, can you?

Yet, you can use the same tutorials, that were created for Photoshop, to learn GimpShop.

If that weren’t enough, GimpShop was created with ease of use in mind and the originators have simplified the learning process so that it’s much easier to learn than Photoshop.

Combine ease of use with free and you have a winning combination that will serve you well when creating great looking graphics or headers for your website(s).

Go to this site to get the free download and get started with GimpShop right away.

RSSHugger is located at http://www.rsshugger.com and is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that interest them. Through the power of the internet marketing and viral marketing, rssHugger brings blog writers and readers closer together.

Here’s how it works.

If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for giving an honest review of the site on your blog, such as I am doing here.

If you want to join rssHugger but do not want to review our site, you can pay a one time review fee of $20. rssHugger will be the first ever quality, spam free, and viral rss directory strictly for bloggers.

After you have signed up, write a blog post about rssHugger as per the agreement and make sure to include your rssHugger blog page in your post.

The more visitors you send to your page, the higher you will rank on the Top 100 page of rsshugger.

To keep the playing field level for everyone, the Top 100 blogs page resets everyone back to zero on the 1st of every month. This will allow those that regularly participate or promote their page on rssHugger to get a lot more promotion in return for their efforts.

If you want to keep your rssHugger blog page ranking high at all times, it is suggested that you might want to add your page to your Blogroll, or make a monthly post informing your readers about the website.

Web video is the most powerful way you can solicit opt ins to your lead capture page.

We’re all gun shy about leaving our name and email address with anyone we don’t know.

Of course, people have been using opt in pages, called squeeze pages, for years and many have had great success.

Even the most successful of marketers have seen huge jumps, in the percentage of people opting in, when they added video to the mixture.

When you arrive at the squeeze page, there is only one thing the person who designed it has in mind, that’s to get your name and email address so they can add you to their list of prospects and start building rapport and trust with you.

The job is made infinitely easier when you can see and hear them explaining the benefits, to you, of the information you’ll receive, just for leaving your contact info with them.

Up until now, the only thing they had going for them was the ability to create some kind of information that was so compelling you wouldn’t be able to resist leaving your name and email address so you could get it.

Now, they don’t have to be nearly as compelling because you might just decide you like them, or decide that they’re honest, just by watching them on a short video that explains what you’ll receive in return for your information.

Without doubt, we judge a book by it’s cover and the medium of web video allows us to present our “book” in the best light.

You’ll want to upload your videos to as many video websites as possible along with directories and social bookmarking sites.  This can be quite a daunting task and take up a lot of time unless you use a video submission software to speed the process up.

You can read about my review of the Traffic Geyser Free Trial and decide it if might be a good fit for your video submission help.  I’d also like to hear your opinions and thoughts about this topic so please leave a comment below.

Web video is one of the top SEO strategies going, at the time of this writing.

As more and more people turn to the power of video, to find information about subjects of interest to them, the search engines are placing more and more priority on video results to their queries for that information.

Pretty much everyone knows that Google is the largest search engine on the planet and that Google owns YouTube.

Most people, however, don’t know that YouTube is the second largest search engine on earth.  That’s right, YouTube is a search engine.

In fact, with the younger generation, YouTube is THE most popular search engine.

They turn to it for information the same way other folks turn to Google, Yahoo or MSN Search.

This trend is growing so rapidly that soon the advantage of video, as an SEO tool may fade.  Until then, you should be scrambling to get on the bandwagon and take advantage of getting into the top page results just by submitting videos to YouTube and other video uploading sites.

The next thing is that you need to know a lot of the tips and tricks that it takes to get the optimum effect from your video submissions.

I’m working on a report that will give you the 5 Deadliest Sins Most People Commit When Submitting Their Videos and How You Can Avoid Them. Watch for the announcement.

You’ll also want to grab a good video submission software to cut the submission process down from multiple hours to a few minutes.

I’ve done a review of the Traffic Geyser Free Trial that you can check out to see if it’s a good fit for you.