If you are thinking of doing business on the internet full time, then you have to seriously think about search engine marketing. Despite what the online ads tell you, making money online is not easy; just ask the people who have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to make it big on the web. And one of the reasons why they failed is because they haven’t harnessed search engine marketing to the fullest.

So what is search engine marketing? Simply put, search engine marketing is a universal term that refers to all the various ways which you can market a website to the thousands of search engines running on the web. The search engine is a fundamental instrument in doing business on the internet, and therefore they are as important as the site which you have built or are trying to build. So to explain it much simpler: I you want to make money online, you need a working site and search engine marketing.

However, as simple a concept as it is, search engine marketing can be quite complicated as there are a wide variety of ways that you can go with it. However, they can be broken down into three key elements: pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization, and article marketing.

Probably the simplest form of search engine marketing, pay-per-click marketing is also the most expensive and least reliable. Basically, with pay-per-click or PPC marketing you are paying for a placement of a small ad on a search engine. The concept is pretty much straightforward: you have an ad on a search engine, and potential customers would see the ad when they use the engine. However, the problem with this is that you will spend a considerable amount of cash, and if you are not careful you might end up with a terrible investment return with nothing much to go on. Pay-per-click marketing has its strengths, but it should not be used as the sole marketing tool for your site.

The next and the more radically cheaper method of search engine marketing is search engine optimization or SEO. In SEO, the target is for your site to be ranked in the Top 10 in the search results for a specific keyword. People usually click the first few links that show up on the search results page, so having your site show up one notch higher than your competitor’s could be the determining factor for a sale. Furthermore, with SEO all the clicks that you get are free of charge, thus giving you a high return on investment. The downside of this, however, is that it takes a considerable amount of time to get on top of the rankings. Generally, a new site must wait as much as nine months before they can get a ranking on Google, and that’s usually in the lower rungs of the search results page.

And the last and the newest of the search engine marketing tools is article marketing. With this method, you supply articles for your site and send them to special websites called “directories”. These articles can then used by webmasters for their own sites as long as they publish your byline as well as a link to your site. When your article is shown on other sites, there will be a chance that people will click your link and thus generate traffic. It’s a rather indirect method of getting traffic, but like search engine optimization you won’t spend much financially.

Generally, these marketing tools for search engine marketing are used at one time or another. But ultimately, the goal is to get traffic, customers, and in turn, revenue.

Visit http://www.ultimate-internet-marketing.com for more Internet marketing resources