Tony Butler Search engine marketing is basically a kind of Internet advertising which involves the marketing of sites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages mainly through paid advertisements. These advertisements can be done on the sponsored listings area on search engine result pages and also through sponsored links. This is one of the most effective ways to popularize a site and bring traffic to it. It can increase site traffic exponentially, although this depends mainly on the quality of the website and its ability to draw visitors. Some of the techniques used for search engine marketing are pay per click advertising, text link ads, and image link ads.
In pay per click, the marketer pays the host website every time a visitor to his or her site clicks on one of the advertisements posted on the said website. This is usually done through the use of sponsored listings, in which the marketer specifies the target audience and pays the host site for a predetermined fee based on the number of clicks the targeted audience creates via the pay per click advertisement. Text link marketing, on the other hand, uses small ads that are made in HTML. Each time a visitor to the target site views one of these ads, he or she is automatically directed to the advertiser’s website for further information.
Image link ads, on the other hand, are ads that display thumbnails of online pictures. The images are linked to the advertiser’s website through hyperlinks. This is more popularly known as banner advertising and is the most common technique used in search engine marketing. Keywords are also very important in achieving higher conversion rates for the website. A good, relevant, and high search engine ranking is achieved through use of appropriate keywords.