For any company’s online presence, proper marketing means more visitors, more exposure and, in effect, more sales and clients. Online marketing is a constantly evolving, constantly changing game. With new elements being introduced all the time – sites like Facebook and new powerful Search Engine Optimisation techniques – and old elements and marketing hot spots falling from popularity, keeping ahead is important in what has become a very competitive world.

Internet marketing is almost exclusively about popularity and marketing yourself based on the latest thing to attract attention. Social networking sites are a great example of this. MySpace began operating in 2003 and, over the next three years, rose to be the number one social networking site in the United States. Advertising space sold well and it was a very successful place for both paid and social marketing. In the April of 2008, and in a very short space of time, Facebook overtook MySpace in popularity. Since Facebook’s inception, MySpace’s popularity has declined rapidly and it is no longer an Internet hot spot for advertising and social marketing.

With a wealth of new features constantly being added, Facebook has managed to attain an unprecedented number of users while providing new ways to market businesses, brands and products. Keeping on top of current social networking sites’ popularity will mean less time wasted trying to market in areas people are no longer visiting.

Search Engine Marketing is constantly evolving as well, with major changes prevalent frequently since the birth of online directories in 1993. Basic Search Engines gathered URL information, but as the web grew they were unable to keep up. In 1994, an unrecognisable version of the Search Engine we know today as Yahoo! was born. As new Search Engine algorithms were created, different websites and different SEO techniques gained and lost popularity. Yahoo! offered commercial directory listings, AltaVista brought natural language queries and AskJeeves added a popularity based ranking system.

Organic Search Engine Optimisation became possible with new algorithms that looked for keywords within a website’s content, and paid inclusions grew in popularity with more businesses seeing the benefits of Search Engine Marketing. Google’s rise in the early 2000′s quickly had other Search Engines fall to the wayside.

New technologies to prevent link spam have been introduced as well as other methods to stop people manipulating algorithms to generate visitors for websites. Refining search algorithms and the way pages are ranked means that Search Engine optimisation is a never-ending game. Proper Search Engine optimisation can mean more visitors to your site, but only if it is consciously done by knowledgeable SEO experts as part of your overall online marketing strategy.