We all know that the point of advertising is to put your product in front of someone's face so they know about it and, therefore, want to buy it. Think of the many ways businesses achieve this in your day to day life – adverts for shoes next to the article on taxes you're reading in the newspaper, a banner advertising chewing gum plastered to the side of the city bus you take to work, adverts on television for everything under the sun, conveniently inserted into the middle of your favourite show, and so much more. Even if you're not particularly interested in shoes, chewing gum or everything under the sun, you still see those adverts anyway – you can't avoid them, because they're put in front of your face without you going out of your way to find them. Ads like these are effective on people in the mood to buy chewing gum around the same time they see the ad, but people not in a chewing gum mood aren't likely to pay attention, rendering the advert nothing more than a thing to ignore.

Advertising on the Internet, however, is a whole different ballgame. Online, people are always busy looking up stuff they're interested in – media, products, services, information – you name it. To look stuff up on the ‘net, you'll likely use a search engine. And this is what makes your search engine marketing repertoire so very important. It's so much more effective than a poster on the subway wall, because the traffic you get from search engines - be it via Pay Per Click ads or organic searches - is automatically qualified traffic. Traffic from search engines is automatically targeted traffic.

Think about it – if someone lands on your dog shampoo website via Google, it's because he was looking for dog shampoo. No one ends up on a dog shampoo website by searching for chewing gum (unless your dog shampoo doubles as chewing gum remover, one supposes, but work with me here). So, this person has arrived at your site from your PPC ad, or from an organic search because he's already interested in whatever it is you've got. You don't need to waste time trying to convince him he needs dog shampoo when it never previously occurred to him, as you would need to do with a print ad, because he's gone looking for it specifically already. He's got his credit card already in hand, he's ready to buy, and all you need to do is give it to him.

So remember: search engine traffic is already qualified, targeted traffic. To make the most of this incredible resource, make sure you devote part of your time and attention to your search engine marketing plans. Search engine optimisation strategies implemented into your website – quality keywords, good tags, relevant content, and the like – will boost your search engine rankings bringing you traffic from organic searches. Add that to the traffic you drive in from your Pay Per Click ad campaigns, and you've got a winning combination that will help you put your product in front of the people that are already want it, which is more than we can say for cereal commercials that interrupt your favourite television show.