On November 15, 2010, I started my internship at Best4u Internet Marketing. Once I started, I was flooded with terms I had never heard of. I am studying Marketing & Communication at ROC Aventus, but I have never learned anything at all about Internet Marketing. That is strange, because the world of Internet Marketing is truly immense and will only get bigger in the coming years. It is top-tier marketing!
The beginning
When you’re just starting out, strange words are flying at you from all sides. SEO, SEA, AdWords, Analytics, SEM, and many more of those words and abbreviations. "Who is Sem?!" I thought at the beginning. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It means ensuring your website appears as high as possible in Google. You wouldn't believe the world behind Google. It’s not just a matter of typing in a search term and seeing what comes up. There are entire strategies, rules, and guidelines behind it. One thing is certain: it is definitely interesting!
Keyword analysis
Next, you start with your first keyword analysis. What?! You compile a list of keywords that are relevant to the client and check how often they are searched for per month. Google has a tool for this. You divide this by the number of results that use the same keyword in their link, and you have a KEI factor. Right… KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. Keywords with a KEI factor that is too low are not worth optimizing for, simply because there is too much competition. These are often very general keywords as well. It is better to focus on keywords that are as specific as possible. That is because you are dealing with long-tail keywords. Woohoo! Learned another new term! These keywords are used by people who are searching very specifically for a product or service.
After a few weeks, you will have mastered quite a few technical terms and are starting to get everything organized.
Link Building
Google determines for itself the criteria on which it evaluates a website and ranks it in the results. Furthermore, these criteria change every time. For example, the number of websites linking to your website is very important. Therefore, you must ensure that there are as many links as possible on the internet linking to your website. The term for this is link building. There are all kinds of guidelines attached to this as well. For instance, you must pay close attention to where you place your links. After all, they must be websites that are relevant to yours. Once you have found such a website, it is also important what kind of PageRank that website has. Hey, strange term number 1001 pops up.
PageRank
PageRank is the rating for your website, named after Google co-founder Larry Page. Your website is evaluated on ten criteria with a score from 1 to 10. The average is your PageRank.
Teaching material
This was just a small part of what there is to learn about Internet Marketing. I have been involved for a few months now and have developed a very different view of Google. It is a powerful medium that you must handle in the right way. You can derive a lot of benefit from it, but you can also be severely punished if you do not follow the rules. It seems to me that it is high time schools started offering educational material to students studying programs such as Marketing & Communication. Especially when you see the amount of money involved. In 2009, SMEs spent 153 million euros on search engine optimization alone. This is just one aspect of Internet Marketing. It is expected that another 100 million was added to this amount last year. Unfortunately, the figures are not yet available. These figures indicate that this is not a small market. Internet Marketing is big and is going to get much bigger.