Search engines
It is much easier to make sales with customers that are calling a company rather than the company is calling them. In the latter case it is much harder because they are interrupting people who are not in the state of mind to buy. But when the customers call, they are in the state of mind to buy because they want the company to solve their problem. In this kind of situation the customer looks in the yellow pages – and in the internet – uses a search engine. Search engine is a tool that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. Search engines use keywords entered by users to find web sites which contain the information the customers are looking for. Some of the most popular world search engines:

- Google.com
- Yahoo.com
- Altavista.com
- Excite.com
- AskJeeves.com

Popular search engines in Slovakia:
- Zoznam.sk
- SuperZoznam.sk
- Centrum.sk
- Atlas.sk
- Google.sk

The interesting thing is that most search engines are free for both parties – the advertiser and the searcher. The problem is that almost every search gives thousands and even millions references and the fact is that only first 100 spots will ever see any significant traffic. Of course, there are ways of getting to the top positions but to get there it is necessary to know how the search engine works. There is always a possibility of paying for the positions in the first places.
Let us take a look at how the link popularity works in the most popular search engine today Google.com. Link popularity is a search engine’s measure of how important it considers a web page using some kind of mathematical formula. Each search engine has their own formula to determine your web page’s link popularity. Google calls it PageRank. The PageRank score is calculated from these factors:

- How many sites are linking to company’s site. The more the better in general.
- The types of sites that are linking to company’s site The more closely themed the better in general.
- The PageRank score of all the sites that link to company’s site. The higher the PageRank of these sites the better.
- How many outbound links are on each of the sites that link to company’s site (the less the better).

From these above mentioned factors is clear that reciprocal links are very important to drive more traffic to the web site.

The traffic is coming from the partners that linked the company’s web site but also from the search engines, because it scored high in the ranking thanks to the links referring to company’s web site.

Free and Paid advertisements
Free advertisements or classified ads can be posted on sites like Inzeraty.sk but the chance of getting customers through this internet marketing tool is very small.