Confusing question because there are two different things at play. One is the search engine itself and the second is a search engine marketing firm.

There are two ways to get appear high on search engines – one is with pay-per-click advertising where Corporation B and Corporation C bid against each other for first paid listing of a given key word.

When customer F searches for "keyword" and corporation B comes up first, if customer f clicks through to corporation b’s website, then the search engine gets paid whatever the bidding rate is.

Search Engine marketing firms make money by helping companies with search engine optimization.

Search Engine Marketing Firm A contacts corporation B. corporation B hires SE Firm A to rewrite their Website in such a way that search engine robots, spiders, and crawlers come back to corporation b’s web site and pick up key words and index them in their search engines. SE Firm A will also rewrite the key words and meta data for corporation B – again so that the search engines index the pages.

Be careful with search engine marketing firms that make you promises regarding organic (Not pay-per-click) positioning. The search engines themselves change their search algorithims frequently to avoid people trying to scam the system. There are plenty of not-very-ethical search engine marketing firms who will promise you the world. They sometimes use means that could get your site kicked out of the search engine all together.

I hope that helped and didn’t make it more confusing.

Advertising. Tell me you don’t notice the ads on the top, bottom. and sides? Do the words ”pop up” ring any bells?

Hi all,

We are talking about SEM firms and not Search engines.

SEM firms have many package through which they can make money.

1) They charge client depening upon the number of hits the SEM firm can get the client.
2) They charge client upon the ranking. This is decided in advance – $xyz for the top page in a particular Search engine.

regards,
JT.