Web Site Marketing

History of Search Engine Marketing

What we now know as search engine marketing started out in 2001 with the launch of Overture, the first pay per click search engine .

Search engine optimization had been around for a while and those savvy to the traffic and targeted nature of search engines realized there could be a quicker and easier way to list web sites. This was the birth of pay per click.

In order to be the first site listed for a particular keyword or phrase you had to outbid the other web sites interested in that keyword.

Whoever paid the most for the keyword or keyword phrase got the first position. Although this is much more expensive than natural search engine optimization it was also much quicker and advertisers flocked to it.

Now Google has their own ppc system called Adwords and the ppc industry is raking in over $2 billion dollars annually from web site advertisers.