What is internet Marketing?

We hear these terms thrown around all of the time, but what do they actually all mean. Internet Marketing is the full blown marketing of a web site. This will normally consist of Search Engine Marketing, which can then be broken down into Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Internet Marketing also consists of another element which is the web site conversion rates.

Search Engine Optimization.

This is the optimization of a web site to enable the placement of the web site within the search engines results pages, sometimes know as SERPs. This process consists of on-page optimization and off page optimization. We will discuss these in greater detail in later articles that will be published, but they pretty well mean what they say, changes to the actual site that will effect the placement, and other tasks performed away from the site that will effect it’s placement.

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is again literally what it says, you pay a third party to advertise your site on their site and every time one of their visitors clicks on your link and visits your site, you pay for that click. The most well know of these is Google’s Adwords. There is also Overture, this is owned by Yahoo and also Microsoft’s Adscenter. These are the big three, you will find others out there and some niche sites also run similar programs. They are particularly useful to gain traffic before your site is placed on the SERP’s. you should be aware that often the competition will click on these links to view your site to see what you are up to. You pay for these clicks also.

Web Site Conversion

This area of internet marketing is often overlooked and not even mentioned by many companies who concentrate purely on the search engine optimization element. However, this is an extremely important element. It doesn’t matter if your site is placed number one for hundreds of excellent traffic bringing terms, if when the visitors arrive they do not convert to sales or leads. We are asked all of the time, why am I not getting sales or calls, my traffic is good, what’s happening. In some cases this can be something as simple as the graphics on the site are uninviting, to the site is nothing more than a bunch of optimized text. The saying ‘Content is king’ is still true, it may not get you placed without other off page elements, but it will keep your visitors interested. So work on your content before you even start to think about placement and advertising. Once you have great content think about Pay Per Click in the short term and search engine optimization to bring you FREE traffic. Don’t spend money until you are happy with what you have.

If you are going to embark on this project yourself, be prepared to spend up to 10-15 hours a week initially, make sure you use sound practice and obey the syntax rules for good HTML. Good clean code will help you in your quest for a sound internet based business, whether it be in real estate or any other web sales based venture.

Rob is a Toronto internet marketing specialist with Leaf Tech Web Inc., specilaising in real estate internet marketing.