The idea of search marketing is based on the simple concept on who comes first near the top of the pile and although it exposes some of the problems with the internet, a solution is some way off.
Indeed, search marketing in reality emulates more traditional types of marketing which apart from the major companies that can afford huge budgets, always comes down the question of how to get enough exposure for a smaller company’s products and services.
Search marketing is concerned with getting a company (or more usually its products and services), near the top of a search engine index page.
The problem comes down to the ever growing size of the internet. Currently, the largest search engine is basically a huge index of all the websites that exist on the internet. It is similar to the index at the back of a large book, but the thing it doesn’t do, it place the listings in alphabetical order.
Now, arguably, that might be fairer, but then you’d have every company named Aardvark, or AAAA Holdings. Nor would that system allow Google to fully monetise its search engine. So Google has created rules – commonly called algorithms – which index a website (in theory), in terms of its popularity. And this is judged on a number of secret criteria, although it’s well known that it’s basically popularity based. Thus, Google will look at number of website visitors and who links to a particular website, to judge where that site should be placed in their internet index.
So that’s search marketing basics – it’s gets more complicated the more you try and figure out how to please Google and your website visitors!