Internet marketing can be broken down in to two main categories, sponsored links and search engine optimization. Sponsored links involve either paying a third party a flat rate to host an advert or link to your website, or paying a certain amount of money to them every time a visitor follows that link to your site (which is referred to as pay-per-click). The main benefit of this method is that you can buy the exposure you want with immediate effect, the downside being that it can soon become expensive, and once you stop paying, you stop getting visitors to your website.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the method of getting ranked in Google, Yahoo and Bing on the basis of the quality and popularity of your website. SEO is the preferable method of internet marketing over sponsored links because, after your initial investment, most search positions can be retained at relatively little cost. SEO has several different elements, but the first step is to establish what search terms, also known as keywords or keyphrases, your potential customers are using when searching for your products and services online. It also allows you to identify and target specific niches, for example; nearly 3 times as many people search for kitchen door handles each month as internal door handles, even though they are basically the exact same item.
On-site optimization is the next SEO consideration. This involves altering page names, meta tags, headings and the anchor text used for internal links to include your chosen keywords and phrases, thus ensuring that any visiting search engine spider or robot is left in no doubt over what your website is about. The content of a website is also rewritten to include relevant keywords throughout the site. The best approach is to have each page of a website target one specific keyword or phrase.
It is important to remember that content must also be well written for any human visitor. You need great content; not only will it convince potential customers to buy your product or service, but informative, exciting content is often shared among the web via blog and article sites, generating back links to your website from other peoples websites. Each back link from an established, good quality website is seen by the search engines as a vote for the quality of your own, and the more links you get, the higher you will rank for your chosen keywords.
Those are the basic principles, but SEO is an ever changing environment. Google, which accounts for the vast majority of search traffic on the web, is continually changing the algorithms it uses to determine which websites should be ranked in which positions, and with the emergence of new Internet surfing habits, such as the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, the field of SEO will no doubt continue to develop as it keeps paces with these changes.
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