Web marketing is an important skill for anyone running a small business to master in our digital, “always on” world. Your customers are likely to see your business first through browsing on the internet via a search engine as they research products or services. So, it is important to understand how to make your business as easy to find as possible for your potential customers.

Unfortunately, there is also a tendency for a lot of jargon about web marketing  to get in the way of good common sense. Here is a list of points to help understand the fundamentals to marketing on the web:

1.  Know your ideal customer – before you launch yourself into the web, write down a profile of your ideal customer. Picture your existing customers and write down typical characteristics such as age, gender, their common interests, and where they live, for example.

2.  Understand the terminology ideal customers use to buy your products or services – write down terms which your existing customers use or which terms are used in the market you serve for your product or service. This list will form the basis of the 'keywords' that you will use on your website  to help search engines find your website who help customers find you.

3.  Research which keywords are being used the most by customers – This sounds difficult but don't be alarmed. Most of the top web marketing  tools help you do this like the 'Hubspot Keywords Tool ' which show you how often a keyword or phrase is searched for each month and how much competition there is for it from your competitors. Ideally, you want to find relevant keywords to your business which are regularly searched for but with low competition.

4.  Design your website  with your keywords – Take the keywords you have researched and use them in the right places on your website. The key places to use your keywords are in the URL for your website (e.g. if you make designer cupcakes in Detroit then aim to have website called 'detroitdesignercupcakes.com'), the title of each page, each page's description, in the content for each page and in the images you use on each page.

5.  Keep your website fresh with a blog  – Search engines take your website seriously if you keep it up to date with high quality content. This is why a blog on your site is so important to keep customers coming back to your site. Post something new every week, at least.

6.  Introduce yourself on social media – Set your business up with pages on social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or Google+ to and put links to your blog posts  on them to attract people to your website.

7.  Set up online ads with your keywords – Use your keywords in Google Adwords to send customers to relevant pages on your site.

The basics of web marketing  are simple but they are a vital foundation for the success of your business online. Get the basics right and you will attract more customers.