The advent of the world web is perhaps the most significant and far-reaching invention of all discoveries in human history. This is because of the magnitude of impact that it did have on lifestyle and way of doing things. For instance, the business world was quick to exploit the immense opportunities provided by the internet in enhancing interaction with other business players as well as the clients. It could be said that Search Engine Marketing (SME) is the main driver of this business interaction.

In 1994, Greg Boser, realized that he could use the internet in order to promote his protective foam equipment in order to effectively fight fires. Consequently, he developed a website that would inform potential clients about his products and services and how they would reach him.

In 1996, OpenText develeped a paid search business model that would play an instrumental role in financing businesses. The main purpose of the system was the use of keywords in order to to do a significant highlight of relevant businesses, products, or services. Being 1996, there was little emphasis in commercialized search listing.

Still in 1996, Christine Churchill made a discovery of the immense potential of internet marketing. She developed some websites for her employer. However, her greatest challenge was the high level of maintenance that was required in order to keep the websites the websites running. Consequently, she liaised with the IT experts and other marketing professionals in order to learn the best way of responding to that.

GoTo.com, one of the most pronounced search engines by then, introduced the pay-per replacement business model. It went ahead to develop the bidding process (otherwise known as the auction method). What this meant was that the advertiser would pay a bid amount every time a user clicked his or her ad. Advertisers appreciated this as a potential marketing opportunity and did not hesitate to pay upto a dollar for every click.

Lastly, major competitors such as Google entered the scene in 1997 in in order to influence how data is organized, indexed and delivered. For example, during the onset of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) marketers would utilize any marketing strategies- whether ethical or unethical. Business owners would leverage spamming, keyword stuffing, and extreme tagging in order to achieve a favorable ranking in search engine indexing. Companies such as Google and Yahoo came up with stringent measures that would heavily penalize such negative SEO strategies.

The modern search engine marketing age has the benefit of more improved technology and better technological gadgets. In addition to that, search engines have increased ranking opportunities in order to respond to the trends of the modern world. For example, business can now use social signals in order to improve their ranking.

However, the modern search engine marketing faces big challenges as far as privacy and cyber crime is concerned. Hacking of websites is now more common and that damages the reputation of a business. Moreover, it leads to exposure of clients’ private information. Similarly, cyber crime costs businesses a lot of losses and this undermines their marketing strategies as well as outcomes.

The future of Search Engine Marketing is optimistic. Marketing strategists are keen to study the history of SME in order to learn from its success and mistakes. The advancement in technology combined with a more aggressive marketing research strategy is going to tremendously improve the SME landscape.