I always feel a bit embarrassed when I have to explain Internet Marketing concepts to people who are new to the Internet. The problem is that if you have been immersed in the concepts for a long time, you do not always realise that they might sound strange and new to people who have not been exposed to them before

It is not really possible to cover everything related to Internet Marketing in an article like this - but let's see if we can cover the most important concepts:

1. Your website.

Obviously you need to have a website in order to promote your business. Then you need to promote your website on the Internet, so that it gains enough exposure to start attracting traffic and thereby promoting your business! This sounds strange, doesn't it? The problem is that there are literally millions, if not billions of websites out there and you are competing against them for exposure!

But back to your website. There are only four important things that you need to keep in mind for your website:

a) It must be easy for your visitors to navigate, with all links and menus clearly marked.

b) It must be easy for your visitors to contact you - display your contact details prominentely on your site

c) It must not be ugly. It also does not need to be excessively pretty! Spending too much money on the look and feel design is probably a waste of money. Why? Because most people look beyond the pretty graphics and pictures to find the information that they were really looking for. Over-engineering your website from a branding and design perspective might just aversely impact its usability (point a) and the ease with which your visitors can contact you (point b) and the ease in which you can update your website content yourself (point d).

d) You must be able to add new content to your site on a regular basis The reason for this is that search engines love new content and you will definitely attract more visitors if you regularly add new content to your site.

2. SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and can be summarized as the activities that you would perform ON your website to make it perform well in the Search Engines.

These include

a) performing keyword research to find out which keywords people are using to find your type of product and service. You then choose the 2-3 keywords that are used most often, but does not have a lot of competition (the competition is the number of competing websites that come up if you do a search with that keyword).

b) After you've selected your prime keywords, you use these in your website's Title tag, the Description tag as well as the Keywords tag. You then also use these keywords in the headings on your home page, as well as in the content on your home page.

c) You also use some of the other keywords that you have found that are relevant, in other places on your home page and in the rest of your website.

d) Making sure that all your website pages have unique titles and other meta tags (descriptions and keywords)

e) Making sure that you have numerous links internal on your site linking to all the other pages inside your website

3. Internet Marketing

These are the activities that you perform OFF your website to make it perform well on the Internet.

The most important Internet Marketing activity is to build links back to your website. You can use the title, description and keywords that you have selected for your home page (see under 'SEO', above) and start building links using these.

You can build links by doing the following:

a) Submit your website to good quality, SEO friendly directories. (NOT search engines. It is a useless activity to submit your site to search engines). You can find a list of search engine friendly directories here: http://info.vilesilencer.com

b) Write 8 to 15 good articles about your industry. Submit these to the top article directories (search for these article directories in your favorite search engine):

- Ezinearticles

- Goarticles

- Articledashboard

- Isnare

- Ideamarketers.com

- Articlesfactory

Also sign up and submit your articles to a number of smaller article directories - there are about 200 to 300 of these. It is worthwhile to sign up for an article distribution service like Article Marketer (www.articlemarketer.com) or use an automated tool such as Article Post Robot to submit your articles. Also try and vary the content of each article slightly so that each of these articles are unique. This will make them stand out more and prevent Google from thinking that they are merely duplicate copies of each other and therefore 'not important'.

c) Build more links by searching for link directories maintained by websites in your target market (although not direct competitors!)

d) Place your website link in your signature and take part in discussion forums.

These are the very basics of marketing your website on the Internet. There are many more topics to cover, such as banner advertising, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, blogging, video marketing and others – but these are the topics for another article!