Internet marketing has many advantages to traditional marketing. One of them is that there is a direct connection between the marketer of a product and the potential client. Another one is the greater ease with which marketers can obtain statistics regarding their market and its activity. Also, internet marketing is less costly than a conventional advertising campaign.



Internet marketing consists of making media - such as graphic advertisements, or audiovisual advertisements ? accessible to people in the different stages of a cycle that is called ?Customer engagement cycle?. The current strategies are: search engine marketing, search engine optimization, banner ads, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. Of course, the first step is to have your url clicked on. For your url to be viewed and exposed to a significant number of viewers and potential customers, it is important that it gets crawled by the search engines? spider programs. The spiders crawl websites based on relevant keywords, and then retrieve information to index the sites. This process occurs ?naturally?, but it takes time and you have no guarantees of a top ranking position in the search results. That's why there are ways to achieve optimization. Either manually or through the use of automated programs, you can have your url added to data centers to assure getting crawled and given a priority ranking. That's what's called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. It means to maximize your chances of getting found when people make a search that relates to your keywords, and thus to maximize your opportunities of reaching your potential clients.

The first step for optimizing your webpage is to revise it carefully and view it thinking of how the search engines are going to find it. For example, you have to choose a title that assures your clients find you when they're looking for your product. If you give your webpage a title with the name of your company ?Green Leaf Press?, you are less likely to be found than if you use a title that describes what you're all about??Eco-building books and manuals?. It is also important to use those keywords that identify you in the first paragraph of your page, in hyperlinks in the page, and throughout the text (without overdoing it). It is by finding all those clues of your website's ?identity? that the spiders can retrieve your information so that you're indexed by the search engines.

Another strategy for SEO is to add your url to data centers of the main search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. You can do this personally or you can use an automated program such as Quickindexer. This program adds your url to Google's data centers, and that greatly increases your chances of being crawled and indexed in top ranking positions. It also updates your ranking position internationally.

With some other engines, like Yahoo, you're asked to pay a fee to have a guaranteed place in the database.

There is much to learn when it comes to online transactions and commerce, but you certainly have to get with the times and consider your options for optimizing your site.