Search Engine Marketing SEM is most important for the businesses who sell goods and services online or who use their websites to generate sales leads. Other goals for SEM including: building a brand, enhancing reputation with investors, generating media coverage, and driving traffic to physical business locations. Organizations such as non-profits, universities, governments, and political parties also use SEM to promote their ideas.
Many forms of search engine optimization only amount to ensuring compliance to search engines' guidelines for inclusion and removing any technical barriers that might keep the website from reaching a proper ranking. However, other methods of search engine optimization such as keyword spamming are often viewed as "gaming the system" and considered unethical. See the article on search engine optimization for details.
Displaying advertisements or sponsored results in an area visually separated from the algorithmically determined results is generally considered ethical. However, some search engines allow the ranking of a website to be influenced with a payment and provide little or no indication to the end-user that this has happened. Since the search engines give the impression or claim that the rankings reflect the relevance or popularity of the websites, this is often seen as unfair or deceptive.