Search engine advertising is, undoubtedly, the single most important factor to the success of an online business. If you have an internet business and you do not engage in search engine advertising, that is no different from opening a retail shop on an isolated street and relying on walk-in traffic to keep your business afloat.

Sure, you may get a little bit of traffic without search engine advertising, but a little bit of traffic is not going to build your business, generate sufficient profit, or be worth your time. It is sure not going to provide you with a viable work-from-home opportunity. A large majority of the traffic to a website comes from the search engines, thus, search engine advertising is not an option for an online business; it is crucial.

The terms "search engine optimization" and "search engine advertising" are sometimes used interchangeably. In general, search engine optimization is the process of getting your website ranked in the search engines without paying for the ranking. Search engine advertising, on the other hand, generally deals with paid advertising that results in your website being listed in the search engines.

True, for many businesses that have niche markets, it is possible to get top ranking in the search engines without spending advertising dollars to get that ranking. It is not a futile effort to try and get a good ranking in the search engines without spending money on search engine advertising; however, in most cases search engine advertising is necessary.

Search engine advertising campaigns may include strategies for getting your website listed in the major search engines, using pay-per-click search engines, and getting listed in specialty search engines, directories and portals. The major search engines are spidering search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are also meta search engines, like Dogpile and MetaCrawler, that draw results from more than one of the major search engines.

Specialty search engines, directories and portals are generally dedicated to a specific topic or industry. Some offer free submissions, some sell flat-rate listings and others sell pay- per-click advertising. All of these options for search engine advertising are worth looking into. The most common search engine advertising is the use of pay-per-click search engines.

Search engine advertising via pay-per-click search engines makes a lot of sense because when you advertise through a pay-per-click search engine, you only get charged when someone clicks on your advertisement and is directed to your website. You have control over your search engine advertising expenses with pay-per-click services because most of them allow you to set a budget and you won't receive clicks over your stated budget.

With pay-per-click search engine advertising, you bid on keywords. Basically, the highest bid gets the highest ranking. A definite advantage to pay-per-click search engine advertising is, unlike major search engine submissions that can take weeks to get listed, once you set up your pay-per-click search engine advertising, your site will be listed within a few hours.

I have learned that the best pay-per-click search engine advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing (previously known as Overture). Google Adwords is a little different from traditional pay-per-click search engine advertising programs because ranking does not rely solely on the amount of your bid. The program also considers your click- through-rate for ranking purposes.

This evens the playing field a little bit because the rank is not determined only by how much you can pay for advertising, but also considers the quality and desirability of your advertised offering. I recommend Google Adwords for your search engine advertising, because Google is the most used search engine on the net.

When you use Yahoo! Search Marketing for your search engine advertising, your site will be listed in rank based on your keyword bid. A major advantage to using Yahoo! Search Marketing for your search engine advertising is that it provides results to a number of different search engines and search services, rather than to just one search engine. Some of the major places your search engine advertising may appear when you use Yahoo! Search Marketing's pay-per-click services include Yahoo! (of course), MSN, AltaVista, and Netscape, just to name a few.