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The basic principles of traditional marketing still apply; and knowledge and experience in marketing is definitely important. However, the medium and tactics have changed with regard to e-commerce, and only a vendor with extensive, successful experience in e-commerce can be effective in helping you successfully market on the web.

A huge aspect of web marketing is the extreme importance of search engine placement optimization, sometimes called "search engine optimization" which is abbreviated to SEO. In traditional marketing, it is akin to yellow page advertisement, but in the Internet, it has considerably more significance by a factor that is tenfold. At minimum.

To summarize very succinctly the importance of effective SEO, please consider this anecdotal scenario based on fact: A small company in a given industry may make a profit of $5,000 per month from its website; that same company with proper SEO can be earning between $50,000 to $100,000 per month with the exact same website. (No promises or guarantees or representations here; the scenario stated is true and stated as an illustration of the importance of SEO).

And the level of sophistication in effective SEO is considerable. Any vendor can perform some degree of SEO, and any vendor can make a claim of successful SEO. However, to the benefit of the prospective client, the effectiveness of SEO is brutally verifiable. Even a cursory study of SEO results will bear the brutal fact of the extreme competitiveness of SEO. The 80-20 rule (80% of the best results being performed by 20% of the competitors) would be a vast understatement of the extremely competitive nature of SEO; the balance is at minimum 90-10, with 90% of the best results being performed by the top 10% of the competition.

SEO effectiveness is easily and quickly verifiable. Have the vendor provide keywords that they claim to have success with. These are the steps you take next:

Ascertain the popularity/competitiveness of these keywords at: Overture Suggestions
Create a matrix indexing search engine placement positions for each keyword, starting with the most popular/competitive ones in descending order in one dimension, and each of the major search engine/directories on the other dimension: Yahoo, Google, Alta Vista, Hot Bot, Excite, MSN, AOL, Lycos.
Are there a lot of #1 to #3 positions for the highly competitive keywords? For example, this would be impressive: #3 in Yahoo and Google for keyword "real estate". This would not be significant: #1 position for keyword: "tuscaloosa real estate of brick homes".

This is one area where you can make allowances for a vendor who hasn't been in existence for too many years. The SEO results speak volumes of the effectiveness of the vendor and is easily verifiable.

SEO is first and foremost in the tool kit of web marketing and typically will generate over 75% of the traffic for a website. Other tools exist in the form of opt-in e-mail campaign, banner exchanges, reciprocal links, snail mail campaigns, forum postings, traditional mediums and others.