DESIDOC Journal of Library and Information Technology, Vol. 28, No. 4, July 2008, pp. 79-82 © 2008, DESIDOC

Your Website: Greater Visibility and Return of Investment through Search Engine Marketing
Thierry Arsenault1 and Daniel Feeny2
Canadian Heritage Information Network Patrimoine canadien|Canadian Heritage 15 Eddy, Gatineau, QC, K1A 0M5. 1E-mail: thierry_arsenault@pch.gc.ca 2E-mail: daniel_feeny@pch.gc.ca

ABSTRACT
Nowadays, the majority of the people find out the required websites information including virtual exhibitions through web search engines. The most commonly used search engines in the market are Google, Yahoo and MSN. This paper basically provides tips to the developers of virtual exhibition websites to make their sites more visible to the public. This is one of the marketing strategies of the web search engines are following to get best returns on their investment. This is a short paper based on the research work done at Canadian Heritage Information Network and their results are communicated in form of short paper. Keywords: Return of Investment, website visibility, use of search engines for marketing.

According to some estimates in North America, 40 per cent of website visitors arrive from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. For some online exhibitions, the figure is as high as 80 per cent. Thankfully, you can use this trend to your advantage. It is simply easier to get potential visitors to click on a link than to have them type your web address into their browsers. The latter is commonly referred to as ‘direct traffic’, and in significant numbers it is usually the result of sophisticated, multi-platform marketing campaigns. If you need to maximize each dollar, then you will love online marketing and particularly search engine marketing (SEM). SEM is the art and science of increasing the visibility of your web pages by boosting their ranking on search engine results. The SEM mix includes: (i) Search engine optimization (SEO):