What I Do For A Living...

I think I have written about it before... But someone asked me again recently... "What exactly do you do for a living?"

Well, I do something called "search engine marketing."

It sounds more technical and glamorous than it actually is... So let me explain...

There are two components to search engine marketing (SEM), Paid Search and Organic Search...

Paid Search - This involves me buying keywords on search engines. So every time someone does a search on an engine (like Google or Yahoo!), I tell the engine, "Hey! I am willing to pay you $0.xx every times someone clicks on my advertisement." The more I am willing to pay, the higher they will list me in their SPONSORED listings.

This requires I spend my time:

• evaluating ad copy
• coming up with new keywords to bid on
• deciding what page of my site to drive the person to when they click on my page
• evaluate whether or not I am making a profit off of the price I just paid for the click

Organic Search (Search Engine Optimization) - This part of my job involves me finding legitimate ways to make my company's site show up higher in a search engine's NON-SPONSORED listings. The traffic I get from these type of listings is free. And the higher up you are listed, the more people will click on your ad. But search engines don't exactly tell you how to get listed high in their search results. So it's somewhat of a guessing game, compared to the paid search stuff.

In order to this part of my job, I have to spend my day:

• determining if we have enough content on our site (which is what users are looking for)
• deciding what new content to add to the site (should I build out new pages around keyword "X" in order to rank high on that term?)
• find other websites to link into my site (and send them a letter begging them to link to me)
• evaluating if a search engine's crawler (which is what they use to go from page to page on the Internet, indexing the content it finds in order to serve it up to users searching) can get through our site
• and much more.

I don't do this alone, of course. I have a team of five that helps me with it. And of course, the whole company puts a priority on this type of Internet traffic... So there are many people that make it happen. It's a fun career.