The history of search engine marketing is not that complex. It all started with a need for traffic. When I initially built my first website, mind you it only took 3 months to complete the project, I was relieved. I thought scores of visitors will be coming to my website everyday. I never gave thought to how that would be possible. Finally, I decided to look for ways to find traffic and obtain a steady flow of visitors to my website. It all started with Yahoo.

Back in the day, there were not that many search engines. There was Yahoo, and there was Lycos. Yahoo had the biggest market share. It was really easy to optimize a website in Yahoo back then. You just had to get a URL, stuff you keywords in that URL and separate them with dashes, and submit your URL to the Yahoo directory. You just had to be careful to make sure to call your About US page with the long keywords list you had in your site's URL so that the Yahoo editors would make your page title in the Yahoo directory the same keyword filled name of your website. Then came on to the scene goto.com. Goto.com has relations with several search engines, and they delivered traffic for a fee. The pricing structure was such that you would pay a fee every time someone clicked on your site. Then came Google, which was started by couple of computer Geeks from Stanford in their garage. Google came up with a sponsored listing program soon after called Adwords. Yahoo was their partner, Soon after, Yahoo dumped Google and went with Overture, formerly known as goto.com. Then Yahoo thought to buy overture.com and now they call it Yahoo Search Marketing! Fancy name huh.

So now, search engine marketing is divided in two. One if natural search engine marketing, which of course is known as search engine optimization, and paid search engine marketing, which is known in most circles as pay-per-click marketing.