Search engine marketing means using search engines to reach your buyers directly. Search engines include general search engines such as Google and Yahoo! as well as vertical market search engines that are specific to your industry or to the people you are trying to reach.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art and science of ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by search engines and that, once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural search results.
Search engine advertising is when a marketer pays to have advertising appear in search engines when a user types in a particular phrase that the marketer has “purchased”. Usually this advertising comes in the form of small text ads appearing next to the natural search results for a particular search term. Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are the two large search engine advertising programs. Maketers bid to have their ads appear on keywords and phrases, competing against others who want the same phrases. Your ad will appear somewhere in the list of ads for that phrase based on a formula used by the search engine that takes into account two main factors: how much you are willing to bid(in dollars and cents) for each person who clicks the ad, plus your clickthrough rate(the number of people who click your ad divided by the number of people who see it in the search results).
