So now that you know what is involved in search engine marketing, how do you go about implementing an effective marketing strategy? Well, the easiest way would probably be to consult a search engine optimization (SEO) professional. A harder way would be to handle search engine marketing in-house.

Despite what you may have heard, there really are no secrets to search engine marketing. Getting a high search engine ranking does not take clever tricks or mysterious tactics. It does however take perseverance, hard work, and a thorough knowledge of how various search engines rank web sites -- attributes that may be in short supply where your in-house staff is concerned.

Getting a top search engine ranking also takes content -- and lots of it. Unlike humans, search engines are not impressed with graphic intense sites, but actually rank them lower, if at all. Instead, search engine spiders are very old fashioned when it comes to web pages; they like themed sites with simple layouts and plain text.

Each search engine has a different set of criteria for ranking web sites. Some look at meta tags, while others look at link popularity (the number of quality sites that link to your page). All search engines however, look for keywords. Keywords are the everyday words people enter in search engines to find things. Search engines not only count the number of times keywords are used, they also determine how prominently they are placed. Together, all these factors determine a web site's search engine ranking. Knowing what each search engine wants is the key to successful search engine marketing.

One more thing should be noted as well: Yahoo!, Dmoz (or Open Directory) and Looksmart are directories, whereas Google, AltaVista, Lycos and MSN are search engines. The difference is this:

A search engine has a database which is gathered by spiders. These spiders crawl hundreds of thousands of pages each day to include them in their database.

A directory is a database built by humans. Every site listed is read by a human and decided if and where it should be placed.