Search Engine Marketing. The effort directed towards using search engines to market a web site, the purpose may include improving natural and paid listings or a combination of these and other search engine-related activities.

Search engine marketing is the Buzz Word in the marketing world, showing 214% growth over the past two years. All this excitement has triggered a rush of companies embracing search engines as a major marketing channel. But these companies risk failure unless they have a coherent search engine marketing strategy that understands this new advertising medium. One has to Follow these Strategies to avoid failure. Your unique search engine marketing strategy will likely include other aspects based on your industry. But these five elements are the common denominator among top-performing campaigns. If your current search engine campaign lacks one or more of these, then think seriously about how you could incorporate them. The results are worth the effort.

Measurement
Good search engine marketers have a strong desire to track every aspect of their ad campaign. Measurement is essential to a successful search engine marketing strategy.

Flexibility
The success of your search engine marketing strategy ultimately depends on your keyword selection. A good strategy recognizes that you will achieve the best ROI when you are pragmatic in choosing your keywords. A good search engine marketing strategy targets a broad range of keywords, going after the little words as well as the big ones. Overture and Google have made it easy to add keywords to your campaign. It's much better to look for small bargains than to fight for one or two big words. The conversion statistics tell you which keywords are working. And note that, while broad matching is a quick way to target a wide range of words, it's rarely your best long-term option.

Curiosity
You're ads are doing well, but could they do better? What if you just made one little change to the ad text? Optimizing your creatives should be a core part of your search engine marketing strategy. Compared to other forms of advertising, it's easy to change your search engine creatives. Since they're text-only ads.

Follow Through
The success of your search engine marketing strategy depends on follow-through. Search engine campaigns are easy to set up. Sadly, that tempts a lot of advertisers to neglect their campaigns after the first few weeks.

Balance
While paid search engine advertising is great by itself, you'll get the most value from a balanced search engine marketing strategy that also uses organic search engine optimization and link building.