Internet marketing is the older name for the same job.

The term of record from roughly 1998 to 2012. It is what the trade press, the conferences and the job titles used while the discipline was being invented, which is why the deepest writing on the fundamentals still sits under it. It went out of fashion rather than out of date.

The same thing, from the same era, favored by people writing for a general business audience rather than a technical one. If you find a distinction being drawn between this and internet marketing, someone is inventing it. There has never been one.

The current common term, and the one with the one real distinction in the group: it names the browser-based part specifically, meaning your site, search, email, social and paid media. That narrower scope matters because it is the part of a budget where attribution is genuinely possible.

The widest of the four, and the only one that is genuinely broader rather than just newer. It also covers SMS, in-app advertising, connected TV and digital out-of-home — channels with no browser in them at all, measured differently and bought differently. If your budget has none of those in it, you are doing web marketing and calling it digital marketing.

For the work, no. For reading advice, yes, and in a way people get backwards. Older material filed under internet marketing is often better on fundamentals like intent, offer and measurement, because it was written before the tooling could do the thinking. It is the tactics in it that have expired, not the reasoning.

Not the name on the tin, but the date on the advice. A tactic that worked in 2010 and fails in 2026 usually fails silently: nothing errors, nothing warns you, the rankings simply do not come. Two examples further down are ours, and one of them we recommended at the time.

We wrote in 2010 that links "need to be obtained the old fashioned way: by earning them with good, unique content". That has not needed a word changed since, and it now also decides whether a language model treats you as a source worth naming.

In 2010 we published a guide to using them, complete with a list of the ones we used. Google's Panda update took the whole category apart the following year, and submitting to them now ranges between worthless and actively harmful. The passage is quoted below rather than quietly deleted.

Finding what people actually type is still the first move. What has changed is that volume alone is no longer the screen. A keyword can carry tens of thousands of impressions and almost no real demand, because the engine buckets variants under one label. The check is cheap and skipping it is the single most expensive error on a target list.

Both were arithmetic dressed as strategy, and both were priced out by algorithm updates that understood language well enough not to need them. Anything that asks you to hit a percentage is from this family and should be treated the same way.

The conversion work described in our 2010 landing page post — one job per page, the shortest form you can live with, matching the message that brought them — reads as current. Interfaces changed; the psychology did not.

This one deserves its own exhibit, and it is below. The figures we published in 2010 for what each position on page one earns were correct at the time and are now unrecognizable, because AI Overviews and expanded results sit between the ranking and the click. Anyone still quoting them is quoting us, badly.

Promoting a business through the internet and measuring what it produces: search engines, your website, email, social platforms and paid media. It is the same discipline as web marketing and online marketing. The term dates from the era when the work was being invented, which is why so much of the foundational writing on it carries that name.

The phrase is out of fashion; the work is most businesses' largest marketing line. What did die is a specific generation of tactics built on gaming how search engines counted things — directory submissions, link exchanges, keyword density, exact-match domains. If the advice you inherited is mostly from that list, it is not out of date so much as inverted: several of those items now cost you rankings rather than earning them.

Digital marketing is genuinely wider — it takes in SMS, in-app advertising, connected TV and digital out-of-home, none of which involve a browser. Internet marketing is the browser part. In most mid-market budgets those are the same set of line items, which is why the terms get used interchangeably and why nothing goes wrong when they are.

Ask what made it work. If a tactic paid because it created something a person wanted — a page that answered the question, a piece of work worth citing, an offer worth the click — it has almost certainly survived. If it paid because of how a machine counted, assume it has expired and check before using it. That test is why some of our own 2010 advice is quoted approvingly above and some of it is quoted as a warning.

A site that can convert, then search — paid first to learn what converts, organic to stop paying for it. That order is set out properly on our web marketing page, along with the eight channels and what each cannot do. It is the same recommendation we would have made in 2010, which is either reassuring or dull depending on what you were hoping to hear.

The fundamentals hold. Measurement is where it changes, and considerably, which is what the click-through exhibit above is about: the relationship between a ranking and a visit has come apart, so being cited as the source has become its own outcome. Our SEO and AI search page sets out the framework for that in full.