What marketing options are available through the internet?

You can market your business and company website through email, search engines, other websites and banner advertising.

Why is search engine marketing effective?

Increasingly people are starting to use search engines to find services and products as part of their daily lives. At work or at home, searching the web is generally recognised as the quickest and cheapest way to find information. Search engine marketing answers this demand for information.

What is optimisation?

Optimisation is a way of improving the position of your website in the search engine listings. Improving the compatibility of your site with the engines makes it more visible in the search results. Optimisation is an effective way of marketing your products and services because people expect to locate relevant information quickly and easily -and indexing your site in the correct way on the search engines makes it possible to find.

What is pay-per-click?

Pay-per-click is a cheap and effective advertising program that search engines offer small businesses so that their website may appear prominently under certain searches. Pay-per-click providers (such as Espotting and Overture) guarantee to feature your site on the first page of results in selective sections of the world's major web search portals like MSN and Yahoo. All you pay to be there is a minimal fee for every click through to your website. That means you only pay when your site gets a new visitor. Bidding usually starts at 10 pence per-click.

What is the difference between pay-per-click and optimisation?

Your site will appear in different sections of the search engines depending on which strategy you use: Sites submitted through pay-per-click will appear in the 'sponsored results' section and resemble classified ads. You pay for every visitor through pay-per-click programs whereas inclusion to the main search engine indexes is guaranteed for a one off yearly fee (sometimes it's even free). An optimised site submitted this way will appear in the main body of results.

Which is more effective: pay-per-click marketing or site optimisation for the search engines?

Every company has different needs and a tailored combination of the two tends to deliver the best results; 'Pay-per-click marketing' is the 'advert' on search engines and 'optimisation' is the 'yellow pages'.

If you have any further questions about search engine marketing, please don't hesitate to ask!