In today’s market, online advertising is more important than ever. Visibility to the online community can greatly increase a company’s leads, and ultimately, profit. Many businesses provide help with online marketing, like DMC Advertising, which specializes is web and graphic design, printing, and all manner of marketing. One of the number one forms of internet marketing that should be considered when planning and running a marketing campaign is search marketing. Search marketing involves increasing a websites rankings on search engines through SEO also known as search engine optimization or through pay per click listings.

In order to understand search marketing, it is important to look at both of the disciplines beneath the search marketing umbrella. The pay per click model of internet advertising is used to direct traffic to sites in which the advertisers are only responsible for paying the publisher for each click the ad received. PPC advertising is popular on blogs and is provided by such big names as Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

Also under the search marketing category is SEO. SEO involves the creation of content in order to affect the search result algorithms of search engines. Websites that have more relevant content containing backlinks to their sites rank more highly on search engine result pages also known as SERPs. SEO looks at the algorithms used, the keywords users search for, and which search engines are being used, then takes that information and uses it to optimize a website for higher SERPs. Optimization may include editing a site’s content, HTML, and other coding to make it more relevant to certain keywords and to help search engine indexes to find sites more easily. Promotion of a site using backlinks is another major SEO tactic.

Social Media Marketing is another major part of search marketing, and involves driving traffic to a site through the use of social media. Marketing to social media users involves the creation of content that can be shared through social networks. As the message spreads from user to user, it gains credibility because it appears to come from peers rather than from a corporate source. Though this is a very profitable component of search marketing, it is relatively inexpensive.

Search marketing, though it refers to a fairly wide variety of marketing techniques, is arguably one of the most important to today’s marketing world. As more and more consumers seek information on products through online resources, its importance will only continue to grow, and sites that provide online advertising will do the same.