Internet Website Marketing

Are search engines the key to internet website marketing ?

No matter how you have become involved in internet website marketing, whether you're a first-time publisher or a seasoned advertising pro, it's essential to find out as much as you can about the key search engines. Only recently have businesses begun to wake up to the financial potential of optimizing websites to give them a foot up the rankings ladder, or of driving targeted traffic to their sites via pay per click (PPC) advertising. Either way you'll want to know where you're spending your time and money:

Google

Conceived in the mid 1990s by Sergey Brin and Larry Page (both PhD students at Stamford University), Google was born in sunny California in 1998. Today it's not only the most important engine on the web, but also one of the most desirable commodities on the stock exchange.

A search engine is only as good as the results it provides and Google's success is directly attributable to its unique indexing system which approaches the web as one big popularity contest. The basic premise is simple: the more people who demonstrate their confidence in you by linking to your site, the more prominent your site becomes. It's a philosophy that's worked well, spurring on growth, and allowing Google to become the biggest and arguably the best. Google's dominance of the marketplace is a dream for internet website marketers as it affords access to the lion's share of web users through a single gateway.

Yahoo!

It's a familiar story: It's the mid 1990s again and two doctrinal undergraduates at Stamford University are messing about with the fledgling web. However, this time it's Jerry Yang and David Filo and they are about to transform Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web into Yahoo! Today Yahoo's global reach is impressive and since 2004 (when they decided to give Google's technology the boot in favour of new software developed with the help of Overture and Inktomi ); they've begun to walk with a distinctly confident swagger.

MSN

Having witnessed Google's enormous financial success; it was only a matter of time before Bill Gates stepped up to the plate. Judging by the size of his global empire; Mr Gates isn't the type of person who's happy to come in second place. MSN's latest search technology brings combines the power of the MSNBot, an Index Generator and the all-important Query Server. The competition is already nervous and it looks like the world of internet website marketing will never be the same.