It doesn't matter if you establish a brick and mortar or online business, or both, your business needs exposure. Businesses in the physical world have this understood much better than most businesses or web sites that open online for business. In fact, most web sites and businesses fail because they think that opening the web site is good enough or they just don't know how to market via the Internet.

Most successful online marketing companies have a well rounded dose of SEO, SEM, web design, and Internet marketing. Each one goes hand and hand with the other.

SEO (search engone optimization) prepares your web site for acceptance into the search engines. Since most of all web sites traffic originates from search engines, it is the most important part of the marketing process. SEO prepares your web site for search engine spidrs to crawl and properly categorize it under the appropriate search term(s). Getting strong organic placemant in the search engines puts your web site in front of endless potential customers or seekers of what your web site offers.

SEM (search engine marketing) markets your web site via search engines and search directories. Submitting your site to as many search engines and directories as you can find helps fast track the search engine spidrs finding your web site and properly indexing it. Paid placement establishes your web site almost intantly on search engines under chosen keywords or key phrases. Search engines like YaHoo! and Google are strong candidates for paid placement.

Internet marketing is another peice of the online marketing process. Article writing, press releases, social networks, and backlinks are just some of the techniques used run a proper Internet marketing campaign. Whenever you click on a banner, follow a link from one web site to another, or read an article online, someones Internet marketing campaign accomplished what it was put in motion to do.

Most online marketing companies have a web designer or a web design department. Their main function is to design legal optimized landing pages, web site redesign, and create other user friendly and easy to navigate web pages. They usually work very closely with the SEO or SEO department to properly name files, url's and links to go hand and hand with the optimization process.

Although you can find companies that exclusively cater to one of the named functions above, I suggesst that you find an online marketing company that can give a well rounded plan of marketing diversity. They can all bring you the results you seek by themselves, but not nearly as powerful as they would if used in a unified effort.