In some ways SEO marketing is like any other sort of marketing. A web business has to get the prospect's attention long enough to stir interest--the first two steps of the familiar AIDA strategy--attention, interest, desire and action.

In web terms this translates into catching a surfer's eye with a link or a search engine listing that garners enough interest to convince the prospect to click through to the site, where desire can be formed and the sale closed.

Clicking through is unlikely to happen on a large scale unless the web site ranks highly in search engine listings. Three tactics reliably improve search engine ranking.

1) Haunt the message boards, with a link back to the site in the signature line. Choose the boards with care, and be sure all posts consist of unique, good quality content.

2) Be a guest blogger. Writing a post for an established blog in the same field as the web site will get attention. It will also get a backlink from the biography box usually offered to guest bloggers.

3) Submit to quality directories in the field. Be aware that search engines penalize directories full of random links, and take care to pursue SEO directory submission only with quality listings.

Marketing on the Internet can be a straightforward process. The biggest hurdle is to achieve a high search engine ranking, and a strategy of supplying quality content, posting to message boards, writing guest blogs and submitting to directories will eventually yield good results.