I’ve just worked out that I have been working exclusively on internet projects for the best part of 12 years, both in agency and in-house roles. That probably makes me quite qualified to answer this question which was posed as a blog topic.

In the last 5 years (which are very much post the dotcom bust), internet marketing has become exceedingly specialised. A few years ago you would have gone to a “one stop shop” digital agency for all your internet needs, or possibly, you would have gone to your graphic design agency for all your design needs including digital.

Whilst this is still true for some companies, it is increasingly likely that you will go to one agency for website design, another for SEO, a different one for PPC management and a different one to send or manage your email marketing. If you do affiliate marketing, you deal with the network, or employ an affiliate agency to manage this relationship and the one with the affiliates. All in all you could be dealing with a whole lot of different elements.

Also, because of this amount of co-ordination required, it has become more likely that a company will employ an in-house internet marketing specialist – an advocate of the website and online marketing, and someone who has responsibility for making the digital aspect of the business a success.

I’m generalising here quite a lot – I know that some companies are pretty advanced and employ their own in-house Affiliate Managers or email specialists, and others are expecting their Marketing Managers to extend their remit to the digital world. But as a rule, the industry has undergone an increasing amount of specialisation – when I first started, everyone was a “web designer” there just wasn’t any other term for us “web types”. Now with the proliferation of specialisms there are as many arms of “online stuff” as there are in any other type of industry.

Even since 2003, web has become more mainstream – there are URLs on every advert. But even then, we turned to the internet for plenty of information on things occurring in the world. Take a look at the Google Zeitgeist for 2003 for instance we were interested in the Iraq War, SARS and Harry Potter. In 2007 it was US presidential candidates and the iPhone.

Search engine optimisation has changed a lot in the last 5 years, back then we were concerned about different things to now, even though the core optimisation of a site has changed little. But SEOs were concerned more about frames, flash sites and getting listed. The search engine traffic was less polarised towards Google than it is today.

Things like social media & blogging were in their infancy (social media was all about forums and community). Web 2.0 didn’t yet exist, podcasts were a twinkle in the future’s eye.

The internet is changing our lives – we are increasingly online – you only need to look at the success of the iPhone, online gaming. Online marketing has changed because of this, becoming more diverse and more sophisticated. SEO is also becoming more specialised especially with the advent of local search, maps integration, and universal search. I’m just glad we don’t have to wait a whole month for an index update any more!