Think of your business as a chocolate cake. You take a recipe, mix the ingredients, bake, and serve. If you’ve done a good job the people eating the cake will be satisfied. If you’ve done a really good job they’ll ask for more. If you’re savvy, you’ll include a glass of ice cold milk.

Your business is a lot like that chocolate cake. You take a product or service, put a price on it, notify your customer it exists, and persuade them to buy it. If you’ve satisfied your customer they will want more. If you’ve exceeded expectations they’ll tell others about your chocolate cake.

Therefore, the nature of a business enterprise can be summed up as follows: satisfying a target customer in a specific geographical location by meeting a need while turning a profit.

For your customer to know your chocolate cake exists, you must communicate with them, even persuade them. Internet marketing is a part of the “notify your customer it exists” component. The two main types of internet marketing are SEM and SEO. SEM is search engine marketing and usually entails paying for advertising spots such as Google AdWords. SEO is search engine optimization which is designing your website with a structure and content that increases its visibility to search engines.

SEO is often referred to as organic, meaning search engines place your website on search results pages naturally. The paid ads in blue at the top of Google are inorganic, or unnatural, meaning that someone bought the right to be listed on that page. A website must be optimized according to specifications in order to rank naturally within a search engine’s results. They better the optimization, the higher the placement theoretically.

Most importantly, there’s the human SEO factor. It consists of converting visitors to paying customers once they’ve visited your website. That is, they read the words on your website and decide to do business with you. You see, they can’t smell or taste your chocolate cake over the internet (at least not yet). So, your words must convince them you’re the one chocolate cake out of hundreds they should eat.