Search engine marketing is an incredibly lucrative and incredibly under-utilized aspect of any online marketing campaign.

When the internet was in its infancy, those companies who managed to get to the top of search engine rankings naturally were rewarded by high numbers of clicks and sales.

As a result of this, massive numbers of webmasters tried to outwit the search engines and their competition by discovering the formulas for site search engine rankings, and created methods to circumvent the natural and honest method of search engine optimization.

Pursuant to this, most large search engines have outlawed the spurious ‘black hat’ techniques for getting to the top of search engine rankings.

The major search engines have also created pay-per-click additions to their natural search engine listings, giving webmasters and online businesses the ability to ‘buy their way’ to the top of a search engine page, if not to the top of the natural search engine listings.

What is left today for the online business owner, and can search engine marketing techniques be effective for creating traffic and sales?

I think that today’s search engine marketing efforts represent only a small portion of the techniques and potential that is available to the honest webmaster who uses ‘white hat’ techniques.

Although many web companies spend billions of dollars annually to get sponsored listings and ‘buy’ their way to the top of the search engine pages, it is assumed that most search engine traffic is still generated via the natural search listings--that is, the unpaid search listings.

What does that mean to the ‘white hat’ (or honest) webmaster? It means that by effectively performing web site optimizing behavior and various search engine marketing tactics that are perfectly natural in execution (so that they won’t be banned by the search engines in the future), there is plenty of room for webmasters to use search engine marketing techniques to generate more business.