Gone are the days when we will flip the yellow pages to get the telephone number of a business or check a printed encyclopaedia to find out more about a topic that we are interested in. Instead, the first thing everyone of our generation would do is to go on Google or other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing to do a search on that subject. Hence, businesses would want their websites to be ranked high by these search engines. To do that, they have to deploy various steps, tactics and strategies to optimise their websites and communicate the existence of the websites so as to draw user traffic to them. The effort involved can be either paid or free.

Search Engine Marketing is the process of deploying  strategies and techniques (that are either free or chargeable by the search engine companies) to make a web page ranked high by search engines when users search for a subject relating to their website.