Jeremy Web[b]

For me, internet marketing is every form of online activity directed towards generating greater profit for a business. For many people this only extends as far as search engine optimisation, but we take it a lot further. The online world is changing fast, and it is important to keep up to leverage every advantage in the increasingly competitive online space.

Search engine optimisation is certainly an important activity, but it must be done professionally so that it:

• Is within the search engine's guidelines of what is acceptable - so called "white hat" activity.
• Drives the right sort of traffic to your site - traffic that is profitable.

SEO is actually quite easy. We can train you to do it for your site in half a day. However it is time consuming, and is often best left to experts like ourselves for the same reason that you don't do your accounts yourself - you have better uses of your time.

So Internet marketing certainly includes SEO but there is a lot more to it. Consider a site that has 100 visitors a day, and every day makes one sale - a 1% conversion rate. If you wanted to increase sales by 100% to 2 a day, you could either:

• Increase traffic by 100%
• Increase the conversion rate to 2%

The traffic increase could take months to achieve or be expensive if you paid for advertising. However the conversion rate increase to 2% might be very simple to achieve and could bring instant results. It might be as simple as changing some of the site text, repositioning a checkout button, or a larger modification of the site.

So internet marketing is about getting more qualified traffic and converting more of it into business. No internet marketing strategy is complete without measurement however - to find out how the site is performing, where visitors come from and what they do on the site.

In the pre-internet days of marketing, the 80-20 principle rule applied. 80% of your business came from 20% of your marketing activity - you just did not know which 20%.

This paradigm has changed online, where it is possible to track just about every action a person makes. Good measurement via web metrics packages like Google Analytics means you can measure return on investment from your internet marketing efforts.

All the above assumes we already know the market we are in. When we start work with a new client, a large part of our time is spent in research, to understand the business, the customers and the site objectives.

So internet marketing is:

• Research
• Qualified traffic generation
• Conversion rate manipulation
• Measurement