Search Engine Marketing for Small Business Owners

January 31, 2008 By

As advertising on the internet becomes more and more popular, many small business owners are turning to search engine marketing as a way to promote their business, their products, and their services. 

Search engine marketing is one of the oldest forms of internet marketing, allowing the technique to be refined by nearly a generation of individuals.  Today, search engine marketing, along with other forms of internet marketing, is a multi-billion dollar industry reaching millions of individuals each day and providing thousands of jobs for people across the country.

Search engine marketing is used to make a website appear higher in the returned results when a certain keyword is typed into a search engine.  There are currently three different ways that a company can use to receive a listing that is higher in the search results than their competitor’s listings; search engine optimization, paid inclusion, and paid placement.  Each of these ways uses a different method to determine which company’s website is listed at the top of their search results for certain keywords.

The paid inclusion method of search engine marketing is exactly what it sounds like.  Companies pay the search engine company to have their web address included in the listings for certain search terms.  If a person types that term into the search box for the search engine, the search results will only include the websites of the companies that have paid to be included in the search results.

The paid placement method of internet marketing is used by search engine companies to determine the order in which the websites that are returned for a particular search result are listed.  Using this method, the companies that pay extra fees to the search engine company will have their web site listed higher in the search results than those of companies that chose not to pay the extra fees for improved listing placement.  Some search engine companies have their services tiered, so that a company can select how much they would like to pay to have their web site listed in the search results and choose to pay an additional fee to be placed at the top of that tier.

The last method of search engine marketing that is commonly used by companies that do business on the internet is search engine optimization.  Search engine optimization involves making the content of the website attractive to the search engines so that the search engines will determine that the company’s website is the most relevant to the topic searched and therefore will place the web site higher in the returned search results.  Search engine optimization is typically achieved by the strategic placement of keywords or keyword phrases throughout the content of the website.

Posted in Marketing