Eric Edelstein

Search Engine Marketing is the term used to describe all visitors going from a search engine to your website.

There are 2 main ways of getting visitors from the search engines (there used to be a 3rd way called trusted feed, but it’s mostly fallen away these days so you can ignore).

1. Where your website is listed in the search engines without you having to pay - called natural, organic or free search traffic

2. Where your website is listed in the sponsored links seciton of the search engine, and you need to pay - called sponsored links or pay per click

There are thousands of websites, and all of them have slightly different ways of working.

However, to start off, spend most of your time on the following search engines as they get most of the visitors coming to them to look for stuff (there is no point being number 1 in a search engine that doesn’t get any people coming to it as they won’t send you any visitors then)….

Google (about half the visitors in the world use Google and even more if you include AOL which displays Google ads)

Yahoo

MSN

Google, Yahoo and MSN account for about 90% of all searches on search engines, so these 3 are the best place to start

If you have some more time, take a look at ASK which has a few percentage points of searches.

The reason search marketing gets tricky, is that all search engines work slightly differently, and you need to know what to do in order to get free or paid traffic (or you need to know which search engine agency you can trust if you decide to pay them to get you sponsored visitors or free visitors from the search engines)

PS: quite a few people find it hard to understand that you often need to pay a search engine optimisation company to get you into the search engines so you can get free traffic. You can try do it yourself, but it does take a lot of time and effort understanding and implementing your strategy.