Before you can start to do search engine marketing, you have to understand what the job of a search engine is. Their job is to provide relevant results to searchers. Period. Their job isn’t to find your site and put it high on their engine. It’s not to have people pay them so that their site comes up high on searches.
People use search engines because they find what they’re looking for. If they don’t find what they’re looking for, they go elsewhere. I rarely use anything other than google now, because I almost always find what I need there (that and because I often forget there are other search engines because I find what I’m looking for so often on google). However, on the rare occasion I don’t find what I’m looking for on google, I’ll go to another search engine and see if they’ll provide me with a result that has what I want.
Search engines know this. They know that if you don’t find what you need, you’ll go elsewhere. That’s the nature of the internet. They also know that if the user finds what they want, they’ll come back and search again.
With this, the first thing to realize about search engine marketing is to provide content on your site that a search engine will think is good, relevant content. If you provide good relevant content, your site will start to show up on search engines.