Your web site can be more than just a calling card.

So you have a web site - now what? Whether you're trying to draw local customers to your brick-and-mortar business, or publicize your ability to ship your products anywhere, search marketing (also known as search advertising) is an important tool for reaching an online audience.

When you place an ad with a search engine, your ad appears on the results page that potential customers see when they search for the term you selected as a keyword. If you choose your keywords carefully, customers will see your ad while they're searching for what you're selling.

In fact, the "big three" search engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) now let you select who sees your ad according to where the user lives (called geo-targeting), or their age and gender (called demographic targeting). That helps you target your advertising to the people who are your most likely customers, thus maximizing your advertising dollars. Best of all, you can track how well each keyword performs, so you can clearly see the return on your investment and make tweaks where necessary. So if you've heard that search advertising is prohibitively expensive for small businesses, it may be time to reconsider.

How do you actually set up a search advertising campaign? Follow these steps:

1. Select keywords

The trick is to figure out which words people actually type into the search box when they're searching for what you're offering. Some search engines make some of this information available online to advertisers to help them get started. To select your keywords:

Define your target demographics for your business offerings. Are your customers mainly women in their 30s to 40s? College-age men? Baby boomers who live in your area?

Put yourself in their shoes and imagine every variation of every keyword that people might think of when looking for products or services like yours. Ask friends or neighbors to help you brainstorm.

Consider investing in keyword research tools. There are software programs that find new variations of keywords, as well as confirm that the keywords you have chosen are actually being searched by the end consumer. Of the many available options, a few of my favorites are Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and Keyword Elite.

2. Leverage the "big three" search engines

Once you have selected keywords, make sure they are represented on the "big three" engines (Google, Yahoo!, and MSN). These search engines enable advertisers to take advantage of some advanced techniques that can help them compete with even the big players in their industry, as well as get the most bang for their advertising bucks. Some of these techniques include:

Break the keywords into two sets: a set for customers who are still in the research phase of the buying cycle, and another set for customers who are ready to purchase. Research-phase keywords like "apple ipod" and "apple ipod reviews" are good for branding campaigns. Buying-phase keywords such as "buy apple ipod," "purchase apple ipod," and "apple ipod sale" can help you track and improve your return on investment (ROI) and launch aggressive bidding campaigns.

Separating the two types enables you to create narrowly targeted campaigns as you become comfortable with search advertising and start incorporating strategies like dayparting (breaking the day into several parts and altering your advertising campaign according to what performs best during each part of the day).

Make sure each ad group is broken down into similar sets of keywords. For example:

SET 1: ipod nano ipod nano 4gb, ipod nano 2gb
SET 2: ipod shuffle ipod shuffle 4gb ipod shuffle 2gb

This enables you to create targeted advertising text pertaining to these keywords. Plus, the algorithms that evaluate ads and assign quality scores prefer ads that are created this way. For these reasons, this technique can help increase the likelihood that customers will click your ad (called the click-through ratio), as well as improve your overall quality score, thus translating into more prominent ad placement at lower costs.

Take advantage of advanced matching options (Google and MSN - Broad, Phrase, Exact; Yahoo! - Standard, Advanced). These matching options allow you to define whether you want to match search terms to keywords exactly or more loosely, resulting in more qualified traffic. Google and MSN allow you to have three options for each keyword; test them out and see which provides you with the best ROI, as the competition level for each of these matching techniques will be different.

Use the geo-targeting feature to identify customers in a specific geographic area. Also, be sure your business is listed with all the free online local listings, such as Yahoo! Local and Google Maps. Online maps and local listings are increasingly popular, and can even be accessed from mobile phones and PDAs. You can target Google Maps from your Google AdWords account for additional visibility.

Sign up for Google Analytics, which is also free. It enables you to track traffic in a detailed manner, even if you get your ROI data from different marketing initiatives (like Yahoo! Search Marketing campaigns) or organic search results.

Don't be afraid to test different keywords and approaches. This will help you better understand your end consumers, and that will improve your ROI.

(Source: Yahoo! Small Business)