Most Effective Search Engine Marketing

With its global audience, the Internet provides a unique revenue generation platform with search engines. In this article, we discuss the most effective search engine marketing.

Most Effective Search Engine Marketing

Search engines are similar to the streets of a city. Some search engines represent the major avenues where people congregate while others are more similar to back alleys where almost nobody goes.

Cutting to the chase, your search engine marketing should focus on Google, Yahoo and MSN. These three search engines control the vast majority of traffic on the Internet. Not only do lots of people uses these engines to find things, the big three provide search results to many other search engines as well. For instance, Google supplies ads and search results for AOL. Dogpile compiles the various search results from the big three in its listings. Alta Vista uses Yahoo search results. This scenario is so expansive that the big three search engines control 90 to 95 percent of all search traffic on the web. This means you need to focus on them to the exclusion of others.

The most effective search engine marketing comes in two forms – pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization. Other forms of search engine marketing, such as banner ads, produce poor results and should be avoided. Let’s take a closer look at the big two.

Pay-per-click advertising [ppc] is platform whereby you pay for placement on a search engine. The two major ppc platforms are Overture and Google Adwords. Overture places ads on the Yahoo and MSN search engines. Google Adwords places ads on Google and AOL search results. Both platforms place ads on other search engines and sites, but the resulting traffic is nominal. 

The advantage of PPC advertising is you get immediate traffic for your site. You can use the traffic to test the content on the site and whether visitors convert into paying customers. The downside is you are paying for traffic, which means you must pay close attention to your return on investment. All and all, PPC advertising should be used at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign while you wait for optimized pages to get natural rankings.

Search engine optimization [seo] is by far the most effective search engine marketing. Once you obtain top three rankings for a keyword, you receive more traffic than you would from ppc and it is all free! This does wonders for your profitability. For example, we pursued seo for this site and have top rankings. Our marketing cost for the site is $0. This greatly improves our profit margins. You should aim for the same with your site.

The downside to seo is it takes a lot of time and work. You can expect to wait up to a year for top Google rankings, although Yahoo and MSN rankings will appear much sooner. In light of this waiting period, PPC advertising is a must at the outset of a search engine marketing campaign.

Search engine marketing is a fairly simple game.