Spending budget in SEM is worth so long as it attracts more unique visitors through search engines. Internet advertising in India is fast moving from flashy boxes and sponsored links to the new buzzword: search-engine marketing. In 2005, total online ad expenditures in India exceeded Rs4 billion ($88 million), of which Rs2.36 billion was SEM, out of which Rs720 million was spent by companies in India, and the rest from enterprises abroad.

According to an industry study by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), Industry wide, the biggest SEM spenders are retail companies, followed by technology, travel and the automotive and banking industries, with non-governmental organizations and property markets also advertising.

Why Can?t We Ignore Spending on SEM?

Those who are into online business wanting to increase the web traffic through search engines should keep their eyes opened to study the trends. Otherwise, they?ll be lagging behind.

Furthermore, the old rules of web1.0 SEO hold less importance in the new web 2.0 world. In a fast changing behavior of search engines, the role of SEM consultant/Upper Ranks should be to keep a good track of the current trends and accordingly suggest the changes required to be implemented to drive more traffic.

Let?s have a look at the following table ? I have drawn according to my level of understanding.

Web 1.0 SEO vs Web 2.0 SEO

Page views vs Accessibility
Reciprocal Links vs Bookmarking/del.cio.ous/dig/BLs
Keyword rich contents vs User generated contents/Interactivity
Meta tags vs description and Title/Optional
SE submission vs Optional
Directory submission vs Automatic crawling by spider
HTML optimization vs AJAX optimization
Reliability on Search engine PR vs P2P network
Personal sites vs Wikis/blogs
Double Click vs PPC

Digg is news search engines while delicious is a social book marking site and del.ciou.ous are news sites while techcrati is a search blog search engine

Technocrati

Blog search engines ? rivals (Google, Yahoo! Msn!)
As of August 2006, Technorati indexes over 55 million weblogs Technorati uses and contributes to open source software.

In gist, there are a few steps, such as, social networking, dig & delciou.ous, tagging, links from user generated contents, etc need to be taken. Moreover, we need to adopt search engine marketing mix to drive traffic not only through global search engines (google, msn, yahoo), but also through specialty search engines like it.com.