Why Internet Marketing? Your website is a virtual property, the cyberspace version of brick and mortar real property. Whatever the purpose of your website, you want people to visit it and do something with what they see while visiting. Usually, what you want them to do is spend money doing business with you. Your site will be visited if it gets lots of traffic. Consider what traffic means in the real world and the virtual world. In the real world, if you have a retail business you want it located on a busy thoroughfare, easily found, and visually compelling enough to attract visitors. The same is true for your website in the the virtual world. In the real world people find your business when you advertise your business and your location in various print, sound, video, and electronic media. The same is true for your website. For websites the preferred method for finding information about products and services is using search engines. In a March 2005 survey by the PEW research center, 78 % of American adult internet users report they use the internet to research a product or service before buying it. The way people find your website with search engines is to enter a keyword phrase in the search engines search box and click "search".

Now for the tricky part. The steps that must be followed to have a shot at being found in search engines are:

1. Determine the important keyword phrases (search terms) you want your site found under.
2. Design your site to be search engine friendly and properly include your important keyword phrases in all the search engine friendly places in your sites pages.
3. Submit your website www address to all the major search engines. 
4. Wait several weeks for your site pages to get included in the search engines database.
5. Do searches to determine where your site is ranked for each keyword phrase.
6. Do search engine optimization for search terms that do not return your site within the first 20 returns.

If you don't have the inclination or patience to do all that you can skip steps 4, 5, and 6 and implement a Pay Per Click advertising campaign in at least one of the majors, Google AdWords or Yahoo Search Marketing. If you don't have the inclination or patience to do all this yourself, consider hiring a firm that offers the service. I have compiled some search engine usage statistics that supports the importance of internet marketing. 

Search engine usage Statistics

The vast majoring (81.6%) of the searches come from the major search engines with Google accounting for 48% followed by Yahoo and MSN.