Internet marketing covers lots of different topics. Essentially it deals anything that could affect the number of people visiting your site and how they manage to find you.

In the days before the internet, David Ogilvy famously said “50% of all advertising is useless. We just don’t know which 50%.”

Weirdly – despite all the tracking available – we actually know a lot less about how effective any marketing is.

Sure, we can measure direct visitors to our sites. There are all sorts of log analysis programs to do that ranging from Google Analytics through to programs like Webalizer and AWStats and even the “raw” access logs. But they don’t tell the whole story.

Visitors to your site can arrive in a number of different ways:

• Typing your domain name into their web browser. This is actually quite common if you put your web address in your advertising or on your business cards. Some people even use the domain from your email address. Some people may also try to guess your domain name from your company name.
• Searching for something on the web. Google tries to give the most relevant results for any given search and if your website comes up in the top handful of results for a particular search then someone may click through to you.
• Links elsewhere on the web. These can be from any website that mentions you. You can influence the places where these are found but you can’t totally control it as some people may link to your site without your knowledge.
• Mentions in emails. They could be anything from a signature you’ve set up in your email program, newsletters and other correspondence you send out or mentions in other people’s emails. You don’t always have control over how this is done.

If your visitors arrive at your site via Google and other search engines then you may be told the words that they used to find you. Google is getting more precious about this data and if the person searching was logged into any Google account (including YouTube and Blogger) then the search terms they used won’t be revealed unless you’re paying for advertising. Doing this is claimed to be a privacy concern but is really just a commercial decision. Expect more things like this as the internet matures – it’s getting more and more commercialised as the companies involved try to get more income.

Until we get to the point where the majority of search terms are encrypted and therefore unavailable, you can use the search words that are revealed to work on your internet marketing efforts. Use them as clues and assume that the ratio of searches is the same for people who are logged into a Google account.

It’s worth taking a look at the search terms people use to find you. Sometimes they are the obvious ones but sometimes they’re terms you’d never have thought of or had forgotten about. When you’re stuck for ideas they can be a great way to come up with things to write about for your website.

Despite all the advances in voice and image recognition, the search engines still work best on the written word.

Google have access to billions of pages of data and they tend to use a brute force approach to analysing that – basically they set up the parameters and let their computers make sense of what they’re given. They did this with their language translation option and they do it with written words to allow them to work out whether a page makes sense or not. Or whether it’s just been written in an attempt to fool their program and boost your internet marketing.

This process is getting better and better.

The search algorithms can work out the meaning of a word depending on the context. So, for instance, the word “apple” can mean different things. If it’s on a techie page, it may refer to a computer or a phone or a tablet. If it’s on a healthy eating page it is likely it refers to the fruit. If it’s on a music page, it could refer to the tech company or the Beatles record label. If it’s on a romantic page then someone could be the apple of your eye. And so on.

The interesting part from an internet marketing point of view is that all these – and more – are automatically recognised. Near enough regardless of the language the page is written in.

Which leads on to “latent semantic indexing” (LSI) which is a posh name for recognising words in context. So if your page about dogs also mentions canines, man’s best friend, pooch, different dog breeds, etc then Google will twig that all those are a reference to the same thing.

Sneaky marketers (aren’t we all?!) will use these LSI alternatives to make their pages keyword laden whilst still being readable by humans.

It also means that you shouldn’t get too worked up about the precise anchor text used to point back to your site. The search engines are smart enough to know that the variants count. They’re also smart enough nowadays to know that you won’t get “perfect” links back to your website all the time and will actually penalise you for over-optimising the links back to your site if they detect unnatural patterns.

Of course, what is natural and what isn’t in terms of internet marketing is open to debate. A lot of what happens on the web by way of marketing is definitely not natural but if it happens often enough then that will skew the data. The trick is to make your work look as close as possible to what passes for natural. So this is definitely an area where striving for perfection stands a good chance of backfiring.

All of this makes internet marketing much closer to an art than a science. Sure you can apply certain principles to it but you also have to interpret what you’re doing and adjust that over time.

One good rule of thumb though is that if what you’re doing feels spammy or a bit unethical, it probably is. And if it feels decent, honest and truthful then that’s a much better place to be!