Internet search marketing should be an integral part of your overall business development plan. Although many people understand that this is true for Internet-based businesses, it is just as essential for tradition offline entities. Today, there are approximately 1.4 billion people with access to the Internet. Any business can get their message to millions of targeted prospects at costs substantially lower than traditional offline methods.
While there are a number of components of Internet search marketing that can be assembled in many different ways, there are two broad classes of Internet search marketing into which all of these components can be sorted. However, before we discuss those, it’s important to have a general understanding of what makes the search engines happy.
Search Engines
Often, when Internet marketers talk about search engines, they talk about Google. And, while there are several others, Google is currently the king of the hill. Further, they are share similar criteria.
As a general proposition, it is useful to assume that the search engines are not primarily interested in the internet marketer. They are interested in the person who comes to the search engine looking for information. And, the want to make very sure they give that user what he or she is looking for. So, if a person enters a search term, the search engines want to make sure they get back links to sites with lots of relevant information about that search term.
So, the first requirement for a business using internet search marketing is to figure out what search terms (called keywords) a potential customer is likely to use and to provide content relevant to those search terms.
Organic Search Marketing
The goal of organic search marketing is to develop a website that is so close to exactly what the search engines are looking for that you achieve the top result when a prospective customer or client searches for your goods or services. The techniques used to develop that high-scoring site are collectively referred to as Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
