In recent years we heard numerous stories on this mysterious world called "The internet" and on its abilities to contribute to the company's advancement. The more information we have, the bigger the mysterious cloud is. On one hand, people "sell" us that in the internet everything is measurable, exact and structured, but in reality the big cloud makes it hard to see the big picture.

A business which makes its first steps in the internet world can easily be sucked into this "black hole" of information of lack of information. In this article I will try to give a basic structure that best describes the first steps a new business has to make when joining the "on-line world" and I will go over some of the components of the Internet Marketing Mix

The first basic Step: Building a website for the company

Most of the websites are perception websites, meaning they showcase the business in general. In other words they are the "business card" of the company.

For this reason, we must give a great deal of attention to the graphic design portion of the website, but we still need to pay attention to other evenly important topics like a comfortable and easy to0 use interface for the surfer and the placement of the site in search engines. For example' a website which is built in FLASH technology can look very good visually, but will placed very low in the search results. In addition, It is important to do a small research on keywords and key phrases for the website and put some emphasis on them when writing the content of the pages.

There is an old argument between website designers and marketing experts, when building a website that its purpose is to be profitable one must put the emphasis on the website marketing principles and encouraging the web surfer to make the next desirable click.

Registering in Indexes and Categories

This is one of the most old (and cheap) marketing tools available in recent years. Because a lot of visitors come from search engines and different indexes, it is important for those indexes to know the website and place it in a high position. In most indexes this service is free, except for major indexes like Yahoo! which require a payment for registering.

Indexes that require payment usually ensure a quick submission to the index and significant better search results. It is possible to register to these indexes in different ways like using different registration software, searching the web for a specific index and registering in it or using and outsourcing company which professionalizes in the field and has a large database of indexes and advanced registering tools. One of the software that offers registration to indexes and has gained a worldwide success is Web Position Gold, which registers the website in one click to a large number of indexes on the net.

Search Engine marketing

After registering the site, the search engine marketing divides into two parts:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)