SEM stands for search engine marketing and is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites.
It works by promoting websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages, primarily through paid advertising.
SEM can incorporate search engine optimisation (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture in order to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results, thus increasingly the likelihood that it will be clicked on.
Paid search advertising has had questions raised about the ethical methods of how search engines present advertising on their results pages, typically relating to the disclosure that it is a paid advert.
