Online marketing, also known as Internet marketing, is simply the marketing of products and service offerings via the Internet. With the explosion of Internet onto the scene, almost every home is connected to your product or service through online marketing. You may have a great service or the perfect product and a fantastic website but that will not ensure visitors to your site. So it's important to get the Internet marketing right.

Online marketing comes in various forms – banner ads, email marketing, paid inclusions, pay per click, affiliate advertising and search engine optimization (SEO). The growth of online marketing has been fueled largely by the expansion of the Internet audience and the convenience a customer can be offered in terms of purchasing online. With the large audience out there, you will want to get as many visitors as possible to your site. This brings us into the realm of SEO, since this is becoming one of the main avenues for an online business to try to increase virtual footfalls to the site.

Let's first talk about SEO – what is it? Put simply, it is the use of an algorithm to improve a sites search engine rankings or hits. This is done by an Internet marketer to try to improve the quantity as well as the quality of visitors to their website. The concept of improved quality is also important here – it is essential to direct the right traffic, people searching for the product or service that you offer or something similar, rather than simply a random selection of people looking for something else. Ideally, your SEO strategy should work with your target market in mind and work towards attracting this target market to the site. Relevance is key, since people looking for a web-hosted tax planning software will not buy wedding invitations, even if driven to the website and will be disappointed.

SEO is important because it covers most of the key areas that marketers need to address while selling and advertising online – it generates awareness, it leads to acquisition of customers and conversion of visitors to customers, and optimizes the marketing efforts to target buyers.

The value of increased, relevant traffic to the site will most likely guarantee increased sales. SEO marketing offers information about your product offering when the interest from visitors is high and, once directed to your site, the visitor can be converted to a buyer immediately. Most companies build out their online marketing strategies keeping SEO in mind. This is essential to the success of a marketing plan, since a good SEO plan can be supported by a pertinent emailing marketing campaign and other PR programs.

Thus, the role of SEO is so vital to a successful online marketing campaign that it can be considered a separate tactic in itself but it is best to make it a well-planned segment of an organized strategy. Consider this: an inappropriately planned SEO may result in wasted resources, optimizing factors that do not link back to the correct target audience in the midst of a highly competitive and growing online marketplace. While many SEO experts and marketers may dispute the process to successful SEO (some say page linking, some keyword basics, others copywriting and so on), one thing most people agree on is constructing an SEO that is closely connected with your marketing strategy so that each supports the other.