What is Web Marketing (Internet Marketing)?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engines like Google, Yahoo & Microsoft Bing create 'organic' lists of websites, visible on the left hand side when a person types in a keyword phrase in the search engine.
They use 'bots', automated 'visitors' to assess your website's relevance to 'keywords' that the user of a search engine might type in.
So the main job in SEO is to make sure that your website is set up for this assessment process, as well as for its final human audience. Both are essential. Ideally this work includes obtaining links into the website from other relevant sites where possible.
The ranking you obtain for a given keyword search in the search engines is then a competition between you and every other website on the internet and the results change every day.
The SEO work is also an essential foundation for working competitively within the Paid advertising system.
The advantage of this 'path' to your website is that visitors come free of charge. But success is not easy to achieve and it takes time.
Paid Advertising
All of the search engines provide paid advertising services alongside their free 'organic' services.
They provide the following advantages :
1) You have flexible adverts which if well written, respond precisely to the thoughts in a potential customer's head as they try a keyword phrase.
This allows the potential customer a feeling of finding exactly what they are looking for without wasting time.
The ideal is to provide a seamless quality journey from the customer thinking of what they want or need, to seeing an advert using language matching their thoughts, to visiting the page relevant to them in your website and then hopefully completing their transaction on the website or making contact by email or phone, whatever is the goal of this stage of the sales process.
2) You skip the millions of websites in the 'organic' listings and compete with just the other advertisers. Paid adverts appear above and to the right hand side of organic free listings.
3) Your adverts can be up almost instantly and be updated or removed as quickly. So your advertising can be very responsive to the market.
4) There is also the option of advertising on relevant websites ie. on a property website, you may want an ad for a surveyor appearing. And this extends to sites like Gmail & Amazon.
You as an advertiser bid with other advertisers for visits. Whether your adverts appear or not, depends on a combination of how much you bid and how the seach engine, say Google sees your website. Effectively you need to build a relationship with Google or Yahoo over time. (Payment is only made for successful visits to your website.)
Management of this bidding process and the relationship can be as fine tuned as you have time to invest in it, but effective work is essential for successful Web Marketing.
