Search engine marketing is normally comprised of two interelated internet marketing tactics. Organic search search engine optimization and paid search marketing. Some website owners choose to engage in only one method while others embrace both. Regardless just understand that the core of search engine marketing is about marketing a website in the search engines.

Organic search engine optimization

Organic search engine optimization is the practise of optimizing a website so that it appears higher in the natural search results for certain keywords. Appearing in the natural search results is extremely desirable becuase not only is the traffic highly targetted it is also free i.e once you are positioned there there is no cost if visitors click on your website. Organic search engine optimization is achieved via practises knwon as onpage optimization and offpage optimization. Onpage optimization is about optimizing the architecture of a website so that search engines can crawl it and essentially get a clear picture about what each page is about. For a more detailed description please have a look at our post on ideal onpage optimisation. Off page optimization is the practise of attracting inbound links to your site. Search engines see linls from other websites as votes for your site and consequently the more votes that you can attract the higher you will rank. One of the most effective methods to attract inbound links is to produce high quality content, however usually when you are just starting out a website this is not good enough. You will have to make an effort to get you own inbound links and essentially maufacture the popularity of yout website. Done the right way this is not seen as spam and can be an effetive method of improving your search engine rankings.

Paid search marketing

Paid search marketing is the secomd main type of search engine marketing. The major search engines (google, yahoo and bing) offer advertising programs which allow website owners to buy ad space on the search engines or their network. The most popular prpgram is google adwords. Google adwords allow website owners to bid to appear alongside the natural search listings for certain keywords. It can be an excellent way to drive laser targetted traffic to a website, however it can get expensive. When running adwords a website owner will pay everytime a visitor clicks on the ad, hence it is also known as ppc (pay per click) or cpc (cost per click) marketing. How much a web owner pays depends on a variety of different factors including the competitiveness of the keyword and the quality score of the landing page. While ppc marketing can be extremely effective is can also be very costly. Advertisers may have to spend a lot of money beforw they find a profitable campaign. It is also possible for web owners to advertise of the search engines network of sites, the most popular being the Google content network. Again this can be an excellent method to drive large volumes of traffic to a site.

For maximum website exposure via search engine marketing is sensible to combine both organic search engine optimisation with paid search marketing. The extent to which a webmaster can do this often depends on time and budget. Search engine optimisation is free however it requires a substantial time investment. Paid search marketing can often cost a lot of moeny before a proftiable campaign is reached. Either way search engine marketing should be a priority for every webmaster.