There is a lot involved with search engine marketing. In fact, it can be a bit overwhelming, even for those with a great deal of experience. The good news is that by taking it one step at a time, it is not hard to learn. And once learned, search engine marketing can provide an effective method of driving highly targeted visitors to your web site.

Keywords & Search Terms
Search terms are the words and phrases that people type into the search forms of search engines. Keywords and keyphrases are the words on your site that match these search terms.

Before you do any type of search engine marketing, you have to understand your target audience and know the search terms they are using. Once you know the search terms being used, these can be included in the content of your Web site as keywords and keyphrases.

Your keywords and keyphrases will also be used if you plan to promote your site with pay per click or keyword based pay per impression advertising.

Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is not about tricking the search engines. It is about understanding what elements search engines look for on a page to help determine the relevance of the page to a search term. By understanding what page elements the search engines take into consideration, and making adjustments to better present your page, you can improve your rank for a search term.

Search engines use programs called "spiders" or "crawlers" that visit the pages of your Web site and index the information on those pages. This includes the content that your visitors see when viewing your page and some of code used to build your page.

It is important to understand that it will likely take more than a month before you see the results of your work. This is due to the fact that it takes time for the search engines to update their databases.

Free Search Engine Submission
Some of the major search engines and most of the smaller search engines will provide a form that you can use to submit your site for free. With the smaller or thematic search engines, this is a good method to use.

For each search engine you'll just need to locate the submit URL form and submit your home page. There is no need to submit anything else. And, you don't need to keep submitting your site month after month. Re-submitting your site over and over after it has been indexed does nothing but waste your time. It will not improve your rank in any way.

Submitting To Directories
getting listed in the major directories is also important for getting your site found by the major search engines. The following directories are crawled by the search engines:

· Open Directory Project - Also known as ODP or DMOZ.
· Skaffe.com
· Sporge
· WoW Directory
· GoGuides.Org
· JoeAnt.com

Pay per click
Paid inclusion is the process of paying search engines to index pages from your site. It is also often called PFI (Pay for Inclusion) or PPI (Pay Per Inclusion).

This option is becoming more popular with both site owners and search engines. Site owners that want to get indexed quickly like it because they don't have to wait for the search engines to find their sites naturally through incoming links and listings in directories. Search engines like it because it is a way to increase revenue by charging the site owners for this service. If you have the budget and you don't want to wait, this is a good option.