Once your site is built, and hosted, an online presence needs to be established. This can be done through a number of means including typical advertising methods such as radio, television and print advertising. These are all legitimate avenues in which to advertise your new site and begin drawing visitors. These types of advertising, however, tend to be considerably more expensive than focusing your advertising dollars online.

Search engine marketing is the primary method of online advertising and encompasses multiple advertising formats and venues. Search engine marketing is actually better represented as “online marketing” as those that provide search engine marketing services must also focus their strategies beyond that of just getting exposure (or top rankings) on the major search engines, but should also help you improve usability and online conversions.

Many search marketing firms focus on one or two aspects of the online marketing process with only a handful that provide complete marketing-oriented services. When seeking out a search engine marketing provider you’ll run across many search engine optimization (SEO) companies that specialize in achieving top rankings. While top rankings are great, that alone is not enough to bring your online business to success. Make sure any SEO provider you talk with understands and incorporates usability into their SEO services. Be careful on this as many usability “experts” focus only on usability from a search engine perspective but not from a user perspective. This oversight can have a negative impact on your web based sales.

While there are many good search engine marketing providers out there, take your time and choose carefully. Be sure to get a list of references, current clients that you can contact to discuss the work the SEO provider has done. If the provider cannot provide solid references, it’s best to move on, regardless of how cheap or inexpensive their services are. In this business you usually get what you pay for. Also make sure you can view actual results achieved by the firm. This will tell you if they are experiences in getting results for very competitive phrases or if they simply target what is easy to achieve.

Overall, don’t neglect search engine marketing. You might find quality providers to be “expensive” but the return on investment achieved almost always outperforms that of the “cheaper” forms and/or the old, offline forms of marketing.