Millions of internet users rely on search engines to find what they are looking for. Search engines have literally made the entire world’s information (well, most of it anyway) available on your finger tips. So for many online businesses, search engines play integral role in bringing traffic to their sites. This bringing traffic to your site or simply put, promoting your website by increasing visibility of your site in search engine is known as search engine marketing (SEM).

Search engine marketing has seen a significant growth in internet business in recent years as SEM is highly targeted (it is actually one of the best form of targeted marketing), flexible and easy to implement. It is possible to start a search engine marketing campaign on low budget as well so it is also cost effective.
There are two basic parts of search engine marketing; one is Search engine optimization (SEO) and other is paid search.  Here is the explanation to help you get the clear idea of what SEO and paid search are:
Search Engine Optimization
With hundreds and millions of pages available on World Wide Web on practically limitless variety of topics, search engine is what that helps you find what you want to read. Sites like Google or Bing are designed to help people to search internet based on important words that are usually known as keywords, these sites are known as search engines. Whereas search engine optimization is the process of achieving a high ranking on search engine return page (SERP).
SEO basically makes the website more visible in the cyber world. It is highly popular and effective because the more noticeable your website is, the higher the rank of the website on search engine- hence more traffic and more opportunities.

Paid Search
Paid search lets you advertise to people who are searching for something that is relevant to your business, for example a candy recipe search may lead to your website selling candies. The largest vendors for paid search are Google Ads, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter.
Many corporate companies pay to increase the visibility of their site on search engines. Also many businesses buy keywords to increase their ratings. This sort of marketing is not without controversy but it has its benefits too like it is cost effective, feedback is instant and usually search providers provide tools free analytical tools to keep track of the ads and their response.

Tags: search engine marketing, search engine optimisation, SEM

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 16th, 2010 at 10:38 am and is filed under internet marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.