In order to make the most of the opportunities the Internet presents, companies should ensure that they have a cohesive, focussed online marketing strategy in place that meets the character and needs of their business.

The web can help your company achieve its goals in a number of different ways, and a good online marketing strategy will bring all these different strands together to form an integrated campaign that will help drive sales and boost the visibility of your company.

Most people find new content on the web by using a search engine, with Google being the most popular choice. Getting your site indexed and ranked highly by search engines is, therefore, essential if you want to maximise your traffic.

The process of improving search rankings for a site is known as Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. The first stage of SEO is to ensure that search engines can access your site and quickly determine what topic each page covers.

This stage is called on-page optimisation and involves inserting phrases that people are known to search for into the copy of your website in a methodical way.

The good news is that writing copy that search engines like results in copy that people like too – clear and unambiguous and focussed on a single subject.

After this stage, the next step is on-site SEO. This relates to the internal link structure and actual coding of the site and ensures that there are no features of the site’s architecture that could be making it more difficult for search engines to “read” the site in its entirety.

SEO is not just about making changes to the structure and copy of the website. Once these elements have been addressed, you can then begin an orchestrated campaign of site promotion designed to gain links from relevant and authoritative websites.

Search engines regard these incoming links as a kind of “vote of confidence” for your site and will rank you more highly the more of them you can obtain.

Another important tool you can use in your online marketing efforts is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising – this is a good way to get visibility for your site, as even the most expert organic SEO campaign takes time to show results, particularly for new sites that are not yet “trusted” by the search engines.

In a PPC campaign, you bid against other advertisers for the most advantageous position in the sponsored links area of the search results. If managed efficiently, PPC can be an excellent way to drive highly relevant and focussed traffic to your site that you can easily convert into customers.

Marketing segmentation for online marketing takes many forms, and before you go out and craft your first online marketing campaign, you need to be sure of who exactly each campaign is going to reach out to. Online marketing market segmentation has several similarities as offline marketing.

Here are some ways you can segment your market. Remember, the clearer you know who your target audience is, the better it is and easier for you to find a place to fit your ad.

1. Demographic segmentation – you can segment your audience by age, gender, education level, or socio-economic status.

2. Lifecycle segmentation – this form of segmentation understands that consumers need different products at different life stages, and you need to target just one of these stages (e.g. pregnancy)

3. Geographic segmentation – in this form of segmentation, you target specific countries, or even as small as a specific neighborhood. This is particularly important if you are a brick and mortar service shop like a barber or law attorney.

4. Job segmentation – segmenting by jobs or occupational roles takes into consideration the roles of the particular person at work. For example, you might be targeting just the purchasing managers of a particular industry.

5. Specialty segmentation – this identifies a very tightly narrow and niche audience that is facing a common issues or have a common interest. For example, you could be targeting only the people who owns a certain model of motorbikes.

The power of the Internet is that is captures the global economy, and because of this, it is best to really niche your focus and find a segment that you can really serve well. By focusing on your segment, it will be easier for you to reach out to that particular segment.