Internet marketing can be broken down in to two main categories – search engine optimization and sponsored links. Sponsored links involve you paying a third party a flat rate to link to your website, much like placing an advert in a newspaper or magazine, or paying a certain amount of money to them only when someone actually clicks on the link, also known as pay-per-click. The main benefit of this method is that you can buy the exposure you want immediately. The downside is that it can quickly become expensive, and once you stop paying, your prominent positions will disappear as quickly as they arrived.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of obtaining rankings in the search engines on the basis of the quality of your website. SEO should be your long term objective because, after your initial investment, most search positions can be retained at relatively little cost. To succeed with SEO, the first step is always to establish what search terms, also known as keywords, your potential customers are using when searching for whatever it is that you are offering. You want to find out which specific keywords will bring the most visitors to your website, for example; nearly 3 times as many people type ‘kitchen door handles’ in to a search engine each month than they do ‘internal door handles’, despite them being essentially the same item.

The next step is the on-site optimization. This process involves altering page names, meta tags, headings and the anchor text used for internal links to include your chosen keywords, thus ensuring that any visiting search engine spider or robot is left in no doubt over what your website is about. Content is also rewritten to include relevant keywords throughout the site, and often you will see individual pages optimized to target one specific keyword, or keyword phrase.

Still, the rewritten content must also make perfect sense to humans (writing it solely for the search engine spiders is a big mistake). You need great content; not only will it convince potential customers to make their purchase, but first class 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 so boosts your search positions accordingly.

Those are the basic principles, but SEO is an ever changing environment. Google is continually refining a number of tools to assist you in diagnosing any potential issues with your site, such as Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools, and with the emergence of new surfing habits, such as the popularity of Facebook and Twitter, the field of SEO will never be one in which you can relax and think that you have the job done.

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