What are search engines? Quite simply put, these are websites that let you find other websites. You may have a fantastic website or might be offering a fantastic product or a service that offers tremendous value to the consumer from the website, but how is the consumer going to know about your website? A search engine plays an important role as the facilitator. Research indicates that as much as 80% of web traffic to a website comes from a search engine. This means that if you are not doing 'search engine marketing', then you are potentially not reaching out to 80% of your web consumers.

So search engine marketing can be described as marketing a website on the search engines to enhance web visibility. Popular search engines include Google, Yahoo and MSN. While there are countless others, as much as 95% of search engine traffic comes from these 3 places. Google and Yahoo together account for 90% of that.

Search Engine Marketing. Organic Results and PPC

Google, Yahoo and MSN, there are 2 ways in which you can market in all of them. The first is the organic results that appear when you type in a keyword and a result is displayed. In the organic results, rankings matter greatly because most of the visitors do not go beyond page 2 or 3 in a result page. Search engine marketing here involves 'search engine optimization' (SEO). Its objective is to try and improve the ranks of the website in the search engine for best results, the website should be ranked in page 1 of the results page when a visitor has typed in a targeted keyword for the business.

But the problem with SEO is that, there are countless websites competing for the same keywords, and the fact that there can be only 10 websites in page 1 means that the results are not guaranteed. Plus, it may take a long time to get results too. Search engines also change their algorithms from time to time and when this happens there is a major change in the ranks. When this happens the business suddenly sees a huge drop in the web traffic and the search engine marketer has to start almost from scratch again.

PPC or Pay Per Click is a way out of this. The biggest advantage in this is that you get results almost instantly. Just open an account, research the keywords, create the advertisements, decide the cost per click, and you are ready to go. The advertisements begin to appear in the paid column and when there is a click, you get traffic to your website. You need to pay the search engine per click, but the amount you pay varies depending on the keywords you have selected and also the position of the advertisement.

All major search engines have a PPC plan there is Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and then there is MSN AdCenter.

Search engine marketing also involves writing articles and submitting to directories to get a link back to the website. While this often also leads to a better search engine rank, but here the idea may be to generate more Internet traffic by making the readers of the articles click on the link and visit the website.