The key to marketing for online businesses is simple: branding. Branding has been a marketing buzzword for a very long time. It has caused a flurry of redesigned corporate logos, spiffy new letterheads, mission statements, rewritten mission statements, and even theme songs, and an endless stream of focus groups to guide the process. All of this can play a role, but branding is simpler than that, really. It’s letting customers know who you are, what you do, and how you do it (and it doesn’t hurt if they come away believing you’re better at what you do than your competition).

If you want to create an identity for your online business, you need to define your brand up front. When customers arrive at your website, the first thing they should see should be what you do and why they should care. There are way too many websites that bombard you with flashy graphics and catchy slogans, yet leave it to you, the potential customer, to figure out what the heck they actually do! This is wrong, dead wrong. The best thing you can do is spell it out. Who you are and what you do should be immediately clear and unmistakable.

A potential customer doesn’t know who you are. The best way to make them care about who you are, is to start with what you do, not who you are. This may not make sense at first, but the most important concept of Internet marketing for online business is that your message should always start with stating a benefit for the customer. What’s in it for them? Then, once they know what you can do for them, you can tell them who you are, and introduce your spiffy logo or flashy graphics.

Rather than trying to get readers, visitors or users, think in terms of creating fans. “Users” visit your site, maybe subscribe to your newsletter, and buy your products or services. “Fans” are better—they rave about how great you are to their friends, cheer you on, and breathlessly await news about what you’re up to professionally. It shouldn’t be too hard to see why fans are better than users.

As much as you love that spinning flash graphic that takes ten minutes to load, the word’s the thing on the internet. What matters most online is what words you use. Don’t believe it? Fire up your search engine. Go on, do it. Ready? Good. Now search by really cool flash graphic and let me know what you come up with. Don’t worry, I won’t hold my breath. If you want online fans, you need to give useful, interesting brand-related content. A conversational tone is best. Write like you’re talking to someone. After all, would you rather listen to a real person talking, or a list of bullet points?

Words are supreme, but visual elements are still important. (You can sigh in relief now, knowing you’ll still be able to use your spinning flash logo). The visual elements should reinforce your identity and message. In other words, don’t decorate. Communicate.

The key to Internet marketing for online businesses is simple. It’s branding. And all branding means is letting them know what you do, how you do it, and who you are.

The “Internet Marketing Attorney” is the pen name of Micah Buchdahl, the attorney who runs www.internetmarketingattorney.com. The site is a resource for lawyers to market their services and firms. The site hosts the Internet Marketing Attorney Awards, and the Nifty 50 Web Site Review. Buchdahl also has a blog, www.MarketingAttorney.com. On the blog, he often answers reader questions.

Buchdahl is involved in HTMLawyers Inc, but the Internet Marketing Attorney site appears to be intended to be helpful, forthright and informational rather than an attempt to ham-handedly steer potential customers toward his consulting services. In fact, the site doesn’t allow advertising sponsorship or vendor affiliations at all. In effect, Buchdahl has created a helpful, well thought out, informative site, not a sales pitch. This, in itself, is good Internet marketing strategy, and suggests Buchdahl probably knows what he’s doing in terms of marketing law firms and lawyers on the Internet.

One of the cornerstones of the site is “Micah’s Nifty 50. It was introduced in January 2001, and is now a reference source for successful law firm web sites. Inclusion in the “50” doesn’t necessarily mean the site is outstanding, but rather that it has an outstanding feature or component. The list is updated periodically, with previous lists still available online. Thus there are now over 200 examples on the site.

The Internet Marketing Attorney rates the sites of each of the 250 largest law firms in the United States. Buchdahl reviewed the sites by surfing each site for an average of 20 minutes and then evaluating them. He gives awards to the top 30 sites: The top ten are platinum, next ten gold, and the last ten, silver.

He evaluates the sites by giving them numerical scores on a scale of 1 to 10 in various categories, and generally avoids giving out a ten—or a zero—unless it is really, really deserved, and describes five as a solid average. The categories are:

• Design, which encompasses the look and feel of the site, not just the graphics. Not surprisingly, some of the most effective designs had few graphics. After all, they’re selling legal services, not flash animation.

• Content, including attorney bios, practice area descriptions and publications

• Usability, which basically has to do with how easily a user can find what they’re looking for.

Consistent navigation is the lynchpin of this category. He considers usability, sensibly enough, from the point of view of those who most likely would use the site.

• Interactivity had to at least include a bunch of email links. Good online forms help improve the score as well

• He also rates the sites for intangibles. Obviously, that is highly subjective. An example of an intangible that matters is smart domain name use.

These scores were then added up. Many firms, not surprisingly, tied, with top tier being in the 40s. He also reviews and rates mid-sized and smaller firms.

The reviews are limited to brief synopses. Buchdahl states that he put more than 150 non-billable hours over the course of six months into the process. Now, my brief review of Buchdahl’s site: Internet Marketing Attorney is a useful tool for law firms trying to market themselves on the net.

The most important goal of internet web marketing is to increase traffic to your web site. You can think of your web site as your shop front; and the more people you can entice to come into your shop front, the more customers you will have. The best way to increase traffic to your website is to increase your search engine rankings. This can be a challenge, but with some work and persistence you shouldn’t have too many problems.

The first internet web marketing tip for increasing search engine ranking is to build your internal and incoming links. Internal links are simply links on your site that link to other pages on your site. It is important that each of your pages contains links to the all of the other pages on your site.

This will increase the page rank of every page on your web site. Incoming links can be placed on other, smaller websites that you have built. These other sites will be smaller and you will only need a few pages for them. Now, put links on these pages that link to your main site and cross link them using the same keywords.

Another thing you should keep in mind in internet web marketing is that you can improve your search engine ranking using some simple HTML tricks. You know that the Title tag goes directly under the Head tag. In this Title tag you have an excellent opportunity to place some keywords.

Don’t just put them in a list though; make a coherent sentence that explains what your site is and what it can do for the visitor. Put 4 or 5 of the best keywords in this sentence. Make sure you have 1 or 2 keywords in each of your Heading tags (H1, H2) as well.

Next, you should know a little bit about Meta tags. These tags used to be search engines’ most used method of ranking webs sites. Today, they are barely used as search engines have moved on to use different methods.

Meta tags are still used occasionally and it will only take a few seconds to put them in, so most people agree that you should have Meta tags in your web page. Use the META NAME=”description” tag directly under your title tag and make a list of the most relevant key words for your site. Don’t use popular key words that have nothing to do with your site; search engines do not like this.

The final thing that needs mentioning regards the keywords on your site. The text on your web pages should have some keywords in it. Just use them sparingly. Put 1 keyword at the beginning of your major paragraphs.

This is enough. If you put too many keywords on your web site then search engines will just see it as spam and ignore it. Also, never put keywords in where they don’t make sense. If you keep these and other internet web marketing tips in mind, you are certain to have great success in the promotion of your website.