In the Internet economy, competitive rules are not driven by physical entities of a company (form, size or location). Each company (read as website) should compete at par with scores of other Web pages to surface before the customer for a meaningful transaction. There are selected `gateways' that determine whether the website should rank better before its prospective customer or go into oblivion. These gateways are popularly termed as Search Engines. Their number, in relation to websites is paltry yet they control the fate of zillions of websites. Each website, in turn, tries hard to do whatever it can to rank favorably so that it can capture their precious attention and convert that to build its bottom line. The task is easier said than done. This article discusses the role of an enablerSearch Engine Marketing.

Imagine for a while the number of websites that are vying for our attention. Latest score reveals that there are more than 3 billion websites only in the case of Google and the number is ever increasing. Going by the lowest fraction, even if we spend a second or less of our time (read as attention) on each of these websites, our entire life span won't be sufficient to visit all the websites on Google alone. (Assuming average life span to be around 75 years and we don't do any other activity than browsing the Web!) There are at least 10 popular Search Engines and few more popular Directories1 with scores of websites in each of them eagerly vying for our attention. Thus, an infinite number of websites competing for finite attention. Kudos to Michael Goldhaber, the Harvard Professor who, predicted and propounded in advance that "The scarcest resource in the Internet economy is customer attention". True to his claim, this prediction turned out to be a reality. In this constrained, congested, attention hunger Internet economy, how would websites reach their prospective customers and what should they do so that they rank first and capture our attention? For all such questions, as of now, the right answer is Search Engine Marketing.

Search engines are very large databases that contain information about Web pages. Search engines are automatically updated by special programs called "robots" or "spiders" that search the World Wide Web for new content and then report their findings to the database. There are many different Web search engines that one can utilize for a search. Some of the most popular ones are AltaVista, WebCrawler and Excite. www.farmingdale.edu/library/gloss.html.