Search Engine Marketing allows your business to expose itself to hundreds, even thousands of potential customers for less than it would cost to do so via traditional print media like newspapers or and direct mail letters. This is great for smaller business owners who have much smaller marketing budgets than the bigger companies.

The basics ideas behind SEM are simple. You need to build a site and the optimize the content around specific keywords that will be called should people use these words to search on search engines. The more effective your ability to optimize your content, the higher your placing in any search engine results. The internet advertises your products 24/7 but you can be waiting weeks or even months for search engines to index your site and of course there are no guarantees your site will show in any event.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Search Engine Marketing takes away the risk of a long wait for keyword indexing and instead immediately secures your placing in the top positions. All you need to do is make bids on the keywords you nominate. The higher the amount that you bid the higher your placings will be. You only have to pay when someone actually clicks through on your link.

PPC allows you to build an opt-in list fast, test ideas for new products and experiment with marketing campaigns. But despite the goodness you do have to pay to stay in the top placings. To do this you can be paying up to $5 or more per click.

Both SEM and PPC, share much in common. They effectively drive targeted traffic to your site. There is a learning curve for optimizing your site for higher places and how to effectively use keywords in PPC campaign. Constant monitoring and tweaking is necessary for ongoing successful results. A time consuming task for the webmaster/business owner.

Contextual marketing is the latest way to market online. Contextual marketing is just as effective as SEM and PPC but is much simpler to use. It produces volume and exposure, but is way faster and easier to use.

Contextual marketing has huge potential because it takes the best component of PPC and SEM but maintains a simplicity of use.

People who click on your site have pre-qualified themselves because they looked up the keywords you had optimized. This will make it far easier to transform them from an enquiry into a potential sale. This translates into increased sales conversion rate and an increase in your profits.