Regardless of the products or services you are promoting through your website and online presence, without effective search engine marketing strategies as an integral part of your business plan, you are totally leaving your success and profitability to chance.

This is especially true if you are taking an offline business online. Compared to the more traditional methods of marketing and advertising such as brochures, postcards, newspapers, and magazines, search engine marketing techniques are:

• Extremely quick
• Focused on your target market
• Totally measurable
• Cost effective
• Within your complete control

The overriding objective of any search engine marketing strategy is to get your web pages on page one of the SERPS (search engine results pages). Languishing on the fourth or fifth page isn't what you want if you are trying to make money online. Notice I said web pages and not just your website's home page. Why?

If you are an experienced website owner, you already know and understand the importance of keywords and keyword phrases in marketing online. Let's say you have a website on fishing and thousands of surfers are searching for information on fly fishing rods. You may get some success if people find the "fishing" home page depending on the quality of the content and how long time they spend looking around your site. Think just how more successful you are likely to be if you have a web page on "fly fishing rods" and it is on page one of the major search engines! Remember, there are keywords that make money, and then there are those that don't, even if you get a lot of traffic.




Literally millions of potential customers go online every single day. If you want to compete for some or even a significant part of that online spend, you need to ensure that search engine marketing forms a key role in your overall business planning.

Search engine marketing techniques and tactics are evolving all the time. The two main reasons for this is firstly, website visitors are still hungry for good quality information and the means by which they can solve their problem (good or bad) but they are becoming more internet savvy and easily recognize blatant advertisements. Secondly, the most important search engine Google, continues to change the search engine marketing rules. These two reasons are not mutually exclusive!
Search engine marketing basically works in two ways.

The first is through what is called an organic search or perhaps a natural search.
Using the analogy of earlier, if someone is searching for the term "fly fishing rods" through their preferred search engine such as Google Yahoo or Bing (MSN), the search engines apply their own set of algorithms including factors such as relevancy and popularity to find all of the individual web pages on fly fishing rods and then rank them before returning all of the search results to the person searching. Now you know why you want to be on that first page.

One advantage of this method of search engine marketing is that because the results are more organic or natural they are trusted more by those searching for the information. This means they spend more time on your web pages and take you up on your sales offer. Another advantage is that this is relatively low cost when compared to paid search engine marketing. The disadvantage of relying on this method of search engine marketing compared to paid search engine marketing is the time and the effort it can take to get on page one of the search results.

The second way is through paid search engine marketing.
If you were to search for "fly fishing rods" now through Google, on the returned results there are two sponsored areas – you may see a few websites at the very top of the page and / or any number of ads displayed down the right side of the page. These are all the businesses online that are using paid search engine marketing.

When a website owner sets up a paid search engine marketing campaign with Google or Yahoo for example, they determine their daily spend and monthly budget. Each time their sponsored ad is displayed, they pay for each click that is made.

The advantages of paid search engine marketing are that each paid campaign is easily set up and your website will get immediate visibility as long as the search engine provider's rules are followed and you are paying enough per click to be displayed on the first page.

The major disadvantage of paid search engine marketing is that you really do have to monitor your advertising spend on a daily basis. You need to track the performance of your paid search engine marketing campaigns, dropping those that are ineffective and determining why the successful ones are successful.
Of course, with either search engine marketing option, it ultimately comes down to the effectiveness of the content that is displayed and if it is attractive enough to compel people to click on your website link.