What are people doing all that time?

To tell you the truth, I´d rather not know, but I do know this: more often than not, they begin by searching.

After all these years, search is still the number one activity on the World Wide Web.

What does that mean to you? In angler-speak, if you want to be successful, you must fish where the fish are. In marketing-speak, you must market on search engines.

Savvy marketers long ago realized that the targeted nature of search presents a rare opportunity to connect with their customers and prospects.

Whether your purpose is branding or direct response, whether your business is big or small, search marketing lets you reach people at the exact moment they are expressing an interest in what you have to offer.

No push. No guesswork. No permission necessary. The searcher renders all of that moot with her query. Become her answer, and you´ve discovered true one-to-one marketing.

There are three types of marketing opportunities available through search engines: Graphical Ads, Paid Placement and Paid Inclusion. The sections below will describe them in detail.

GRAPHICAL ADVERTISEMENTS

Graphical Web advertisements have gotten a bad rap. From banners to skyscrapers – heck, sometimes even those annoying pop-ups – graphical ads work well on the Web if they are presented in the right place, at the right time.

It´s common sense. If someone is reading an article about fishing and you display an ad about cooking, you are unlikely to get that person´s attention – unless, perhaps, the ad is about cooking fish.

Otherwise, the only way to get their attention is to interrupt them, or worse yet, overwhelm them. That´s how pop-ups were born.

Search is different. Regardless of the graphical unit you choose to employ, or the objectives of your campaign, search engines produce results because the ads are only displayed when a searcher has submitted keywords related to your product or service. Keyword-targeted banners regularly outperform their content-targeted counterparts for this very reason.

PAID PLACEMENT

Now it gets interesting.

The most graceful marketing solution the Web has yet seen, paid placement programs guarantee that your site will receive placement within search results relevant to a particular query.

For example, if a San Francisco-based accounting firm wants to be sure that its Web site is included among the search results for users seeking information on estate planning in the Bay Area, a paid placement program will ensure that a link to the firm´s Web site appears within the results set for the query "Bay Area estate planning" (as well as potentially dozens of other keyword combinations with similar meanings).

Goto.com (now called Overture) was the first search engine to sell paid placement "listings," back in 1998. AltaVista, meanwhile, became the first major engine to test the waters with paid listings one year later.

Unfortunately for AltaVista, the notion of "tainting" pure search results with paid placement went over like a lead balloon. Responding to outcries from users and press alike, AltaVista dropped the program after just two months.

By 2000, however, every major search site was employing paid listings. Not-only did they prove to be the most cost-effective ads on the Web for many marketers, but users stopped minding them after realizing that paid listings appear only when relevant.

Paid listings are typically sold on a "cost per click," or CPC, basis. This means that advertisers only pay when and if a person clicks and visits their Web site.

Pricing can fluctuate depending on the keyword, phrase, or category sought. Most, however, fall in the /home/httpd/cgi-bin/cmsLocate.cgi.25-/home/httpd/cgi-bin/cmsLocate.cgi.75 range. Not bad, when compared to the average cost per telephone call returned by advertising in the yellow pages.

PAID INCLUSION

Watch your step. We´re rapidly approaching the cutting edge.

Paid inclusion programs are the most misunderstood form of online marketing. The misunderstanding usually occurs in making the distinction between paid placement and paid inclusion. Some think there is no distinction. They´re wrong.

The trick is not to over-think it. As noted above, paid placement lets you buy and guarantee your site placement within search results.

Paid inclusion, on the other hand, guarantees nothing other than that your site´s pages are included in the "index" of Web pages (usually 1-2 billion strong) that a search engine combs through for relevant results.

If an engine´s algorithms find those pages relevant, they will appear in whatever order the algorithms deem appropriate, whether that´s ordinal #1 or #45,237. On the other hand, it may not choose them at all.

What exactly are you buying, then? Services. Services related to the inclusion and maintenance of your site´s pages within a search engine, such as:

1. Access to dynamic pages = more qualified traffic: Search engines have a difficult time finding "dynamic" pages, usually associated with e-commerce sites, because they are constantly changing and don´t last very long. As a result, search indexes are not as complete as they would otherwise be, which hurts both the quality of the engine, and the would-be destination sites, which could represent very relevant results. Through paid inclusion, search engines have set up a system to accept these pages.

2. Frequent site refresh = dynamic offers: Non-dynamic pages that nevertheless change often risk being outdated by the time a search engine finds them. Through paid inclusion, search engines will spend the time and resources on refreshing participating sites more often than they do for other sites on the Web. Their relevance rankings do not change, but the content on those pages does.

3. Accelerated inclusion = get new products launched fast: "Crawling" the Web for new pages is a difficult, costly, and time-consuming activity for search engines. If a new site wishes to gain access to a search engine´s index immediately, without waiting for its next scheduled crawl, that requires special treatment and resource allocation, and search companies charge for it. Paid inclusion is priced in several different ways, but the most common are annual listing fees per URL (geek-speak for "Web page"), and CPC. This is a rapidly growing marketing platform, and any marketer with the objective of driving targeted traffic to his Web site would be wise to learn more about it.

This article has outlined the major search engines marketing vehicles, but each requires a dedicated mind to truly understand and take advantage of. As Shrek wisely observed, "Ogres are like onions because they both have layers." Add search engines to that list. It may sound like a daunting task, but search engine marketing is already a billion-dollar industry - and projected to grow by 30% per year through the end of the decade - for a reason. Get started now, or you may get left behind.