Internet Marketing Uncovered: Discover The Industry Secrets

Internet marketing refers to the practice of communicating a company product or service over the internet. It is also known as web marketing, online marketing or eMarketing. There are many forms of online marketing ranging from search engine marketing to banner advertising and paid search marketing. The industry in the UK is rapidly creeping up on television as the most popular and effective medium of advertising.

Internet marketing can refer to anything from direct email campaigns to banner advertising within a social networking website. There are two main types of internet marketing that generally separate the medium; paid marketing and natural marketing. The former refers to the purchase of advertising space within a website and the latter refers to the practice of optimising websites to enable natural profile within search engines.

Paid marketing is one of the most lucrative parts of web marketing and the practice incorporates any form of online advertising that has to be paid for. A homepage interactive advertisement on a leading social networking website for twenty four hours can expect to draw in over one million unique hits in that period however the client can expect to pay in the region of 30,000GBP for the impressive results. Other forms of paid internet marketing are banner advertising, paid linking and paid search.

Paid search is the practice of bidding for keywords in the sponsored listings of a search engine. Otherwise known as pay per click advertising this is a very popular form of web marketing for corporate clients who invest more in paid search than natural search.

Although paid search is an important part of online marketing, many corporate clients neglect organic search optimisation and get involved in expensive bidding wars over the most popular keywords, the best results are seen when a combination of paid and organic search are used strategically.

Organic search is the practice of formatting a website in line with search engine compliancy so that it ranks highly when internet users search for certain key terms. This process is specialised and involves the optimising of all aspects of the website from the programming to the inbound links. The more relevant to site is to what it is trying to achieve, the more the search engine spiders will recognise it as being relevant.

There is no formula for search engine optimisation however fundamental principals can be observed and adhered to, enabling optimum search listings. Since 1998 Google has been returning unique and relevant search results which used innovative technologies to filter results for relevancy to the search term as opposed to predetermined criteria which were easily manipulated by internet marketing experts.

These internet marketing malpractice techniques such as black hatting, keyword stuffing, hidden scripts and server side cloaking, were used to manipulate search engines such as Alta Vista and Lycos to obtain high results without relevancy to the key search term.

Google now punishes websites using techniques such as these including banning a website completely from the search engine. Industry professionals specialising in SEO will testify to the damaging effects of these practices on a website's online profile which personifies the importance of organic SEO compliance.

The natural listings that can be obtained through compliant search engine optimisation can be enhanced with other paid internet marketing strategies such as pay per click advertising. For seasonal trends and specific product launches combined internet marketing strategies have proven to provide an unprecedented return on investment. The traceability of internet traffic provides essential data that can be analysed to hone online marketing strategies, ensuring that your campaigns are reaching the most relevant consumers.