Search engine marketing is the process of promoting a website through Internet search engines. The goal of search engine marketing is to increase the amount of traffic to a particular website by raising its visibility on search engine result pages. There are a variety of ways that a company can implement search engine marketing. There are opportunities for paid placements, context advertising and paid inclusion. The most common form of search engine marketing is search engine optimization.
Search engine optimization is the process of writing and editing the content of a website so that the website will receive more visitors and to ensure that the visitors to the website will be potential customers. The content of the websites as well as the HTML coding of the website are edited.
The importance of using the proper keywords when optimizing a website cannot be overemphasized. Marketing professionals that have experience with search engine optimization will determine keywords that are both relevant to your website and include commonly searched terms.
Paid placement is the process of buying advertisements on search engine result pages. These advertisements are not included in the search engine results. Depending on the search engine website, the paid placement advertisements may be listed along one side of the results page or at the top of the results page.
Contextual advertising allows your advertising to appear in a pop-up in the text of a page. These types of advertisements are popular on many forums or bulletin boards. The key to having an effective contextual advertising campaign is with the proper selection of keywords. We have all seen irrelevant websites attached to certain words, and the result is annoying, and not likely to make us visit the website.
Paid inclusion is a form of search engine marketing which allows a company to purchase placement on a website for their advertisement. This type of search engine marketing closely resembles more traditional advertising methods. Again, for this to be an effective choice, it is important that your advertisement appear in front of potential customers.
One form of search engine marketing that you should stay away from is black-hat search engine optimization. Black-hat SEO uses tactics such as keyword stuffing to bring your website to the top of the results page. Keyword stuffing is the process of loading your page with a list of popular keywords that are irrelevant to your website. While this process may temporarily raise your website in the results page, long term results are poor. Search engines frown upon the practice, and are constantly removing, and often black-balling, websites that use this practice.