What is Search Engine Marketing ?

Search Engine Marketing is the work in getting targeted traffic to a website from search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and the recently launched Microsoft offering Bing.

The search engines were developed in order that the average joe, sitting at his PC, could make sense of the ever increasing sprawl of websites on the internet. By typing in keywords or search terms into the engine she could quickly get results which (in theory) were both relevant and authoritative. Today the technology involved in order to bring those results forth is a staggering triumph of scale and computing power. Google’s own blog estimates that in July 2008 they had over one trillion web pages in their ‘index’ database – all these results could become available in milliseconds upon any individual query !

Search Engine results can be divided into ‘paid’ (or sponsored) and ‘natural’ (or free) listings and so there are two separate activities (or ‘weapons’) which can be used to get traffic to a site – Search Engine Optimisation (for free traffic) and Pay Per Click Marketing (for Paid Traffic).
Why bother with Search Engine Marketing ?

To put it simply, if your are a business owner, and want to use your website as a successful sales prospecting tool you’ll have to. The reason for this is that around 80% of new traffic for an average site will come from the search engines.  So if you don’t promote your site in this way, you’ll be missing out on 80% of your potential customers online.

Given the fact that offline directories such as Thomsons and the Yellow Pages are seeing a serious decline in use due to the fact that people “Google” something when they want to find it – it makes sense to consider SEM as a must have tool in your marketing armoury.