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It helps to know the insides of search engine marketing prior to launching a campaign. Read this article to discover what it's all about.

As the name suggests, search engine marketing involves the use of search engines like Yahoo, Google, MSN, and Alta Vista etc for the purpose of advertising, promoting, or marketing a particular website.

Components of SEM

Some of the main components of this type of marketing are:

 Search Engine Optimization: This covers a set of various techniques and procedures that help maximize a websites search engine ranking, when an organic search is conducted.
 Pay for Inclusion or PFI: Numerous web directories are available on the World Wide Web, apart from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Many of these directories are molded around certain topics. You can list your website in these directories and thus aid your search engine marketing efforts. Some directories offer free listing, while others offer paid listings.
 Pay per Click Advertising: You bid an amount that you are willing to offer users who click on your banner ad that you place on search engines such as Google or Yahoo. The more your bid, the higher your search engine ranking.
 Google Adwords: This is an extension of the Google Adwords program, wherein, Google ranks your advertisements on the basis of the importance given to your website.

Importance of the Marketing Process

Search engine marketing is only for those people who want to use the power of the internet to give their business a boost in the right direction. What this type of marketing does is that it gets traffic to your website. Pure and simple! This means that more people will look up the products and service on your site and the more your chance of selling them.

As aforementioned, there are various components that will help you in the process of search engine marketing. Take the case of search engine optimization. It increases your ranking in the search engine and thus in turn increases the number of hits on your website.

An important reason why people are increasingly veering towards this type of marketing is because it is cost effective and offers high returns in the process. You do not have to invest as much money, as you would in the traditional forms of marketing. It's ideally suited for small businesses that have to be cautious about their bottom line.

This method has allowed them to be more competitive and increase their sales speedily at a constant rate.

Measuring Efficacy

To measure the effectiveness of the search engine marketing strategy, you first need a clear set of objectives. If your basic intention was to increase the amount of traffic that visits your site, then you could easily determine this by putting in place a hits counter on your website.

On the other hand, if you want to know the in-depth worthiness of your marketing strategy; you can utilize some of the procedures and methodologies that are earmarked for this process.

In the end, it's a way of not only attracting visitors to a site, but also a method where you can increase the conversion rate of visitors turning into customers.