Words of the Week: Search Engine Marketing

The field of search engine marketing is usually split into two distinct areas:

• Organic search engine optimization
• Pay per click advertising

However, many people, both those in the industry and those not practicing in the search marketing industry, often mean pay per click advertising when they make a reference to search engine marketing and refer to organic search engine optimization merely as SEO.

Search engine marketing is a component of Internet marketing, which includes website promotion techniques that go beyond both pay per click advertising and organic search engine optimization.

Search engine marketing, or SEM, is important to small and home businesses because its techniques can be used to help even those with a small budget drive more traffic to their websites. Ultimately, the goal of the increased traffic is sales revenue growth and/or brand recognition.

Search engine marketing is the focus of this week's About Home Business spotlight. If you haven't considered looking further into search engine marketing to see how it can help your business, you definitely should. You can bet that the majority of your competitors are becoming more and more aware of this rapidly growing area of marketing.

If you become skilled in search marketing techniques for your own site, you also open up the possibility of search engine marketing as a foundation for what could be a lucrative home business by offering services to others.

Search Engine Marketing Defined

Related terms:
Search Engine Optimization
Pay Per Click Advertising