Online, Internet, or Search Marketing?

What IS in a name?

My surname, for instance, means either 'mighty as a boar' if it's from Saxon Germany, or 'native of Evreux' in what is now northern France, if it's Norman.

My wife Jacqui's surname is French-speaking Swiss, via Jersey. I'm still amazed at the series of coincidences that brought us both to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

Anyway, I recently posed a question on Facebook:

'If you promote your business on the web, which do you use - online marketing, Internet marketing or search engine marketing?'

What I was trying to get at was not so much, 'Which do you use' as, 'What do you call it?' because the three terms are to most people virtually interchangeable. What I really wanted was a clue as to what search term I should optimise a website for.

But the people who answered tended to choose one type over the others, so I had to re-think.

Now, I still think 'online marketing' is interchangeable with 'Internet marketing', but they both cover a wide range of marketing strategies that happen to employ Internet-based technology. Emails, for example, or direct mail sending people to an otherwise obscure website.

For instance, Andrew Reynolds doesn't bother too much about optimising his sales pages for the search engines because he knows he can rely on exceptionally good direct mail to send visitors to them.

So if you're not on Mr Reynold's list, you might not ever stumble across one of his promotions in time to take advantage of it.

Whereas what we specialise in, under the broad title of 'online marketing' is in fact search engine marketing, or even just 'search marketing'. We get our clients' websites higher in the search results and we add a few more useful listings as well, so our clients don't so much show up on Google as invade it.

Much like the Saxons and Normans invaded England, actually. Maybe it's in the blood.

So that's what I've been doing with some of my time: invading Google and daydreaming around quotes from Shakespeare. How very English.

Roy