Search Engine Marketing first began to show up online before the turn of the century when consumers used search engines to assist them in finding products and services and the companies that sold them. As time went on these search engines starting booming in usage. Thus began the birth of Search Engine Marketing.

The practice of using search engines to market a business is so incredibly common now that search engine marketing, or SEM, has become its own industry with vast amounts of information available to all who would dare take advantage of it. You can find tons of information from its origins and even controversial subjects that can even destroy a marketers marketing efforts. The valuable information though are all the strategies you can use to help create a successful, long term viable online business.

So what is Search Engine Marketing?

Well…it’s a term that describing all the various marketing techniques used to make your website or blog more visible to the search engines.

There are two very specific forms of Search Engine Marketing techniques that marketers can utilize. The first technique uses free methods and the other uses paid methods. The free method of search engine marketing includes using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – optimizing a website page or blog so that search engines can easily find it. The paid method includes buying Pay Per Click (PPC) advertisements. There are certainly other methods of buying advertisements, such as media buying, but PPC is the major technique used.

Search Engine Optimization involves using various strategies including keyword rich tag lines and articles during the creation as well as the maintenance of a website. Alternatively, Pay Per Click advertisements are sponsored listings in which the advertiser (website owner) pays the search engine to “spotlight” the site in return for payment each time the link is clicked. Both forms of Search Engine Marketing can prove to be invaluable for a struggling website and can easily increase the traffic brought to the site.

Free and paid for advertising each have their pros and cons. Free advertising doesn’t cost money but takes more time. Paid advertising is much faster to implement but costs money. The form of Search Engine Marketing that takes the most effort and maintenance is Search Engine Optimization.

If you are into article marketing, you must create a series of articles, blog posts, forum posts, etc. By including your links you are able to direct the traffic to you want to your website or blog. These articles typically display keywords that are relevant to the site’s theme of the business being promoted.

An example is if a writer is hired to promote a company whose service specializes in Identity Theft Protection. The writer would use relevant keywords inside the article like “Identity Theft” or “Identity Protection”.

The goal with writing articles like this is to saturate the internet with keywords and keyword phrases that trigger the search engines to list your site within the search results pages as per the request of the consumer.

Writing an article for SEO purposes takes a lot of work. When writing for the purpose of marketing products and services for a company you need to capture the full scope of those products and services. To do this effectively you need to provide researched information and that takes a lot of time (and possibly maybe even a monetary cost as well to some extent. Where one article may be geared towards specific information such as for teaching or technical aspects, another article may geared towards a simple or casual approach.

Even these casual approaches in writing articles can have marketing undertones by providing hints at what is to come. These round about methods of marketing is great at capturing a reader’s eye, especially when it seems they are not interested at that particular time.

If your articles are to be Search Engine Optimized articles they must also be “search engine friendly”. A friendly article is one where the keywords you want to “tag”, in relation to your website, are alerted by the search engines when consumers are searching for your specific service or product.

Search Engine Marketing is it’s own booming industry by anyone’s standards. With the proliferation of web-based businesses growing everyday, SEM is a force not to be reckoned with. The best part is that it doesn’t matter if your online business is large or small.

All businesses alike have the same chance to be successful on the Internet if they use proper search engine marketing techniques and strategies. The only two requirements that you need to meet are a certain amount of time and/or money…and of course the right information at the right time.

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After all S.E. traffic is targeted traffic.  You control the keywords used to make it targeted.  Search engine traffic can convert quite well, depending on how well you write your sales copy.  And…best of all…it’s FREE!  …OR rather it’s free if you don’t pay for it using Pay Per Click Advertising .

But with all these benefits, there certainly is a downside to getting all this free traffic.  That downside is the terrific amount of effort that must be exerted to get that traffic.  In order to rank effectively enough so that people actually find your site on the Search Engines can require a massive amount of effort.  On top of all this effort, another major requirement is an inordinate amount of patience.

Three little ingredients are there necessary to win in the Search Engine game of life – Time, Money and Work (or Effort) .  How much of each you are willing to expend will certainly determine how successful, or unsuccessful you will become in getting that search engine traffic you so long for.

If you do not want to do the work necessary and wait to rank well for the likes of Google’s search engine, than you can use some of your “Money” to get more instant results instead.  By using Pay Per Click advertising through Google Adwords , you can buy your way to your success instead.

Besides using PPC (pay per click) advertising there are a number of other ways that you can drive traffic towards your direction.  These ways are independent of organic search engine rankings.  One of my favorite methods is by using various social media tools and other “Web 2.0″ methods which will bypass most of your search engine ranking concerns.

Try submitting a video to YouTube and see what kind of traffic you get.  If your video is done well and is targeted to a specific audience, you can do quite well with it.  Myself, I love using Squidoo.  Because I love writing, I will put up a good Squidoo lens, choose a bunch of great related keywords and then start bookmarking the lens to the top social bookmarking sites like Digg, and Stumbleupon.

But again, this still takes a certain amount of work.  So, unless you are willing to pay, it could be a little tough to play.  If paying is still your preferred style, the only way to truly generate a significant amount of traffic and a consistent flow of visitors with the potential of becoming paying customers will inevitably involve some form of advertising – and advertising is going to cost you cash, sometimes a lot of cash.

This is one of the biggest reasons that most people will eventually return to hunting for organic search engine traffic, that elusive holy grail.  But with practice and patience, the amount of effort and time involved to find the traffic you want is not that hard and can be very rewarding.

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