There are several types of keyword marketing that may be useful in driving qualified visitors to your website. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is related closest to what would be considered "free listings" in the search engines. The second is Search Engine Marketing (SEM) where you get the pleasure of paying per click for every visitor who goes to your website via your keyword marketing campaign.

Depending on your website strategy and objectives, it may be important to market your website using one or more methods.  Through our website strategy consulting, Quick Square Consulting will be able to advise you about the use of SEO and SEM. Both of these methods require close integration with the website itself, which is critical to realize since there is a large segment of search engine marketing companies out there that have limited skills and understanding how a website can built or changed to convert visitors into paying customers.  This is not the fault of these companies. They have the expertise often on the driving traffic side of things – but do not have the in house know-how to create killer web tactics once visitors arrive at your site. Once they get there you have about 5 seconds to make your first impression.

Starting in the late 1990s pay-per-click advertising was starting to mature into a viable investment for companies to generate qualified traffic to their websites. Popular banner advertising that were CPM, cost-per-thousand impressions, started to get a boost, especially when combined with keyword-driven ad display technology. The text ads driven by keywords became king. Of the companies pedaling these services, GOTO rose above the rest in the abilty to drive at least 10 to 20 times the number of clicks as other competing services.

For years, Google's only offering was CPM top-sponsored search listings which were contracted and managed by dedicated advertising reps. After several years, Google started to offer its self-serve pay-per-click advertising tool, Adwords.

And in the Google way, their self-serve pay-per-click advertising tool was more automated then Goto's (which now was called by this time, Overture. Today it's Yahoo!Search). Yes, "Do No Evil" is one of Google's well known mottos, but an unspoken motto has to be, "Invent, automate it, then invent something else. Repeat as needed."

Okay, so what's next?  More on Search Engine Marketing »