Internet marketing can be broken down in to two main categories – sponsored links and search engine optimization. Sponsored links involve you paying a third party a flat rate to link to your website, or paying money to them only when someone actually clicks on the link, also known as pay-per-click. By paying for sponsored links you can get the exposure you want immediately, the downside being that it can soon become expensive, and once you stop paying, you stop getting visitors to your website.

Search engine optimization (or just SEO) is the process of obtaining rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing on the basis of the quality and popularity of your website alone. SEO is the preferable method of internet marketing over sponsored links because, following the 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 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, approximately 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.

On-site optimization is the next SEO consideration. This process involves altering page names, meta tags, headings and the anchor text used for internal links to include your chosen keywords and phrases. This is necessary so 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 referred to on forums and blogs, and each time your content is referred to you will likely get a link pointing to your website. Each back link from another website is seen by the search engines as being an indication that your website is a quality one, and so boosts your search positions accordingly.

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 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 prevalence of social media sites and user generated media content, the field of SEO will never be one in which you can relax and think that you have the job done.