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| Search Engine Marketing A search engine provides free facility of searching to a visitor. It is far superior to directories or portals, as they show a limited list of websites in few categories. The lists are not only smaller in size compared to a search engine list, but also far less inaccurate due to human intervention and lack of periodic updating in positioning. A visitor to a portal or directory has to look up in several sub categories for a specialized search. A searcher, with lack of vocabulary, may not be able to express his search term, spends hours of futile surfing in the listed websites. Few lines of descriptions provided by the webmasters are not adequate to convey all aspects of any website. A search engine on the other hand picks up the clue from keywords written by the visitors in phrases or in Boolean form. As the search engine crawlers update indexing of all the available websites quite frequently, returns a machine generated list appropriately positioned for satisfaction of most of the viewers. A surfer can have instantaneous ranked list, if he can narrow down his choice of keywords and phrases. The free facility of finding the desired websites attracts the internet community as the necessity of loading human memory with long and different domain names doesn't arise. A visitor stores only the frequently visited websites in the list of favorites in his computer. Periodic erasing or formatting the hard disk doesn't seriously affect the searching process. Searching in search engines is a very common activity of all internet users today, as it is free and efficient. Comparing the search results in different search engines is also possible in search engines like dogpile.com, mamma.com, vivisimo.com. In spite of being free, the popularity of a search engine depends on accuracy of results and satisfaction of the viewer. Over the years, due to large investments on computer softwares for producing more up-to-date and better results, search engines have acquired a very strong grip on the internet media for marketing. How do they achieve the economic viability of providing free facility to a searcher? |
| The answer is paid inclusion in lists or sponsored websites. Webmasters are eager to increase their visibility or increasing their traffic. The smaller search engines cannot afford the growth rate of large search facilities of modern major search engines. They purchase the search results from the major ones in exchange of money. Each search engine has its own list of clients or sponsored websites looking for traffic increase. But the major or minor search engines earn huge profits as new merchants are continuously entering the field of online selling of their products or services with affordable budget. The rate of sponsoring by a search engine depends on the volume of traffic it can provide to their customers. However the list of sponsored websites is quite limited compared to the general list. Positioning in the sponsored sites list calls for higher bidding among the competitors. The search engines donot guarantee satisfaction of a surfer when he visits a sponsored website. The cost of a sponsored ad depends on the number of competitors bidding for a keyword. As bids vary from half a dollar to few tens of dollars, position in the sponsored list improves towards top. The popular keywords evoke very large number of searches from the visitors. Tne main list attracts high traffic for higher ranked websites. But the visitors mostly come for impression. If they are unique visitors, they may not venture any on line buying. The visitors to the sponsored sites are prospective buyers. A good share of this targetted traffic is quite profitable if the merchandise or services are expensive. Depending on the conversion ratio of no. of visitors (prospective buyers) from search engines to no. of actual buyers, the merchants having online products find search engine marketing quite profitable compared to any other media or methods. The merchants adopt a process called "SEO" or search engine optimization to facilitate automatic selection by a sponsoring search engine for relatively different sets of keywords written by the surfers. However bidding rate is the same for all keyword phrases formed within a keyword group. |