The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization — or SEMPO — is a non-profit corporation organized to serve the “search engine marketing industry and marketing professionals engaged in it.”
According to their website at sempo.org,  Search Engine Optimization (or, SEO)  ”is the process of editing a web site’s content and code in order to improve visibility within one or more search engines.”
As a standalone, SEO may still be too young and unwieldy to qualify as an academic discipline. But knowledge of the methods and procedures of  SEO is now at least a requirement for contemporary marketing professionals.
SEMPO’s “Circle” membership includes Thomson Findlaw, Texas Instruments,  Constant Contact, Intuit, and a number of leading SEO marketing companies.  SEMPO has organized two dozen working-groups across the globe. And with a membership of 652 companies internationally, SEMPO is positioned for a central role in the process of standardization that will eventually make SEO a true professional qualification.
SEMPO’s learning center offers information on SEO in English, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malay, Russian, and Spanish.
Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) is defined at the SEMPCO glossary page as,
A form of internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEM methods include: search engine optimization (SEO), paid placement, contextual advertising, digital asset optimization, and paid inclusion. When this term is used to describe an individual, it stands for “Search Engine Marketer” or one who performs SEM.
When a website is indexed by a search engine spider, text on the page is captured and assigned a relative position within the search engine database. The entire database is then subject to algorithms that sort the pages and produce a fine-tuned result for search engine end users.
When a page has been customized and optimized for publication on the Internet, search engines will respond by making that page more visible in search results.
This is the essence of SEO.
If you are a professional marketer in need of a jump-start on all thing SEO, your first stop should be a thorough review of sempo.org. Besides a useful glossary of SEM terms, the site contains a substantial resource library, and offers a calendar of webinars and traditional seminars specializing in the affairs of Search Engine Marketing.
So, what are the most important steps you can take to improve the rank of your page in a research result?
- Make sure you include meta tags for “description“ and “keywords” in the /head/ section of your HTML.
- The /title/ tag of your page is heavily weighted by the search engines. Make sure that you use your most important key words in the title.
- Careful selection of keywords in page text is critical. The keywords you choose for your title should match the most numerous and important keywords in the text section for maximum effect.
- Get listed in DMOZ.org. Many search engines get their host of websites from the list at dmoz.org. If you can get listed at DMOZ, your website will eventually spread throughout most of the major search engines automatically.
- Backlinks. Search engines will rate your site based on its relative popularity. If you have lots of links back to your site, your site will be rewarded with increased rank.
That will get you off the ground in a pinch.
For more information on Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization, visit http://www.sempo.org/learning_center/resources/
See also HowStuffWorks.com on Search Engine Optimization.
