Search Engine Marketing
The internet is a massive source of information available to everyone across the globe. This huge amount of information is completely useless without the ability to search it.
Every person going online uses search engines. Most people use the phrase “google it” on a regular bases. The term Search Engine Marketing was proposed by Danny Sullivan in the year 2001. It is an internet advertising practice which involves promoting a website on the internet by increasing their visibility in the Search Results.
This is done by using the following methods:
Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine optimization is the process in which the contents of the web pages of a website are edited and re-organized so that they become potentially relevant for certain keywords on specific search engines.
Pay Per Click: Here the Search Engine Company only charges the ad provider when there is a legitimate click on the ad of that company. When a user searches for something using keywords, on the search results page there are some links that are labeled as “Sponsored Links”. When a user clicks on these links and lands on the ad provider’s webpage, then only the provider will be charged for money. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft use this model in their search engines.
Paid Inclusion: where the Search Engine Company charges a fee to include the web pages from the website in their index. This practice is not widely used with most search engines allowing free submission of web pages to their index, like Google.com. Companies using paid inclusion can also charge using the Pay-Per-Click method and often the line between these two methods is debatable.
The major players in today’s market of search engine advertising include Google Inc. with its Adwords and Adsense program, Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft along with some other players that target on specific types of searches like Ask.com and Goto.com.
These companies have realized the potential behind this great revenue generation tool and in the words of Steve Ballmer, CEO Microsoft, “Online Advertising is a key revenue generation application of the Internet that is very big in potential and it’s going to be super-big in the future.” This indeed is not an exaggeration and in coming years, online advertising seems to rise exponentially in popularity as a revenue generation tool among advertisers as well as search engine companies.
