Here's the scenario: one morning you open your email and your inbox is flooded with emails that your site isn't working properly. Maybe your text or images don't look right, or even worse maybe your site isn't properly processing credit card transactions. How could this happen when you didn't change a thing? Well, that morning could be the morning later this year that Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 7.

How are people going to get IE7?

According to Kevin Yank in a recent issue of the SitePoint Tech Times:

“Word on the street is that, upon its release (before year's end), IE7 will be pushed out as a forced update to Windows XP users everywhere, as was done for Service Pack 2. The move to IE7 among the end-user masses will not be a gradual migration, but a sudden and significant shift.”

One night Windows XP users will go to bed using IE6 and the next morning they'll wake up, install a routine update, and just like that they'll be using IE7 to browse the web. That means, that as a site owner, you need to begin preparing immediately for IE7's impending release.

What's different about IE7?

From a user's perspective, improvements include tabbed browsing, better printing, RSS feed integration, more advanced searching, and better security features, as well as a plethora of add ons to enhance the user experience (similar to Firefox extensions).

However, the most important changes that will have a more direct impact on how your site is loaded and displayed are:

* RSS integration – IE7 automatically detects RSS feeds and asks you to subscribe. It also gives you the option to have IE7 auto-check for feed updates (even when it's not running). Is your feed properly recognized by IE7?
* Updated CSS behavior – the IE7 team worked very closely with the W3C workgroup to ensure standards compliance. They made over 200 changes from IE6 to become compliant with CSS2.1. Even if your site is standards compliant, it may not be rendered exactly the same as it is in IE6 or Firefox.
* AJAX XMLHTTP Request changes – the IE blog states: “to have your cross-browser AJAX work better with IE7, you really should be invoking the native XMLHttpRequest (the cross-browser one) first to see if it’s available before instantiating the ActiveX control, instead of the other way around”
* Added security features – everything from more secure SSL defaults to disabling most Active X controls by default has been changed to help make the user's browsing experience more secure. These changes could drastically change your users browsing and purchasing experience.

As more Internet consumers begin to use broadband connections for their personal use, the more options you have to incorporate rich Internet applications (RIA) into your website. A Rich Internet application will provide your users with a new and improved web experience that is mutually interactive, engaging and flexible. RIAs provide the instant response that is received when using desktop applications but now on the web. Examples of RIAs can be a product configurator, an Internet Bot, or an intuitive audio and video site. Now many of these use heavy amounts of bandwidth but as more people move to broadband there will be no issue in terms of page load time.

Two popular technologies that are being used to create rich Internet applications are Macromedia Flash and AJAX. Flash is a popular authoring software that was developed by Macromedia. It is used to create vector graphics-based animation programs with navigation interfaces, graphic illustrations, and simple interactivity for the Web. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a term describing a web development technique for creating interactive web applications using a combination of: * HTML (or XHTML) and Cascading Style Sheets for presenting information * Document Object Model and JavaScript to dynamically display and interact with the information presented * XML, XSLT and the XMLHttpRequest object to interchange and manipulate data asynchronously with a web server.

Ok, so this might sound a little confusing right now but my point is that these two technologies offer the flexibility to provide a more engaging user experience that will increase customer satisfaction and ultimately increase your sales. Many large companies, such as Reebok, Dodge, Timberland and Ikea have already developed rich Internet applications for their websites to provide a more interactive and engaging user experience. If you click on the links above, you will see an example of the various types of rich Internet applications that I’m talking about. Reebok and Timberland provide a custom product configurator that is 100% interactive and allows you to build, customize and purchase your own shoe online, Dodge provides an extreme audio and video experience that is truly engaging and visually appealing to the eye, and Ikea uses Anna, their female bot, to help answer your questions and guide you to the specific area of the site that you are looking for.

So now you’re probably saying, “Ok, this is cool and all, but how will this increase my sales?” In my opinion, it all comes down to proving a web experience to your users that is unlike any other site. If you provide your user with an engaging and interactive experience that is user-friendly and easy to navigate then I guarantee you will increase customer satisfaction, which will increase sales. Your users will have so much fun building your product or interacting with your bot that they will be more inclined to make a purchase from your website. And even if they do not purchase from you, they are likely to pass a link to your site to their friends and family, who may purchase from you.

It’s all about the exposure. Providing an experience for your users that is unparallel to your competition will be sure to drive traffic and increase sales. So think about the future of the Internet, research the Internet “big dogs”, and analyze how you can begin to incorporate rich Internet applications into your website. If you do this now, you will be way ahead of your competition.

Why do some people have 10’s or 100’s of products online, all contributing to a nice income, and others do not have any?

One of the biggest differences is that those individuals who have multiple products online have broken through a barrier in terms of being able to quickly innovate, think up, and create products that have value online.

Individuals with many products online understand that although some of the products may not be best sellers, there is a volume effect that comes from marketing many products.

They simply determine that they are going to create products that will help the online community, and then simply create them.

So where do you start?

What are your talents and what is your knowledge base? What do people need that you can offer? What information do you have that took a considerable amount of time to learn and you know that you would have paid to gain the information you have now, in the form of an ebook or audio, rather than the year or two it took to learn the information through trial and error?

Quickly brainstorm the different types of products you could create with your specialized information. Perhaps an ebook, or a CD, or an online video.

All are quite easy to produce, once you determine what information you want to give to others.

Write an outline for the information you have that you want to share with others. Write down a purpose statement for your information product. For every step in your outline, ask yourself, does this information add to the purpose I have created for this product? If it does, keep it in. If it does not, leave it out.

Simply get to work creating your product. Once you have your outline, simply start writing. Write the ebook or write what you are going to teach for the CD or video product. But the key here is to simply start writing. Probably the single greatest hold-back in product creation is not getting started, not doing the work.

"Come on Jeff, you talk about me creating multiple products like I can do it, when I haven't even created one!"

I hear this all the time when working with our members at BuildingYourIdealPractice.com. It's much like what Richard Bach, author of Illusions, has said about limitations:

"Argue for your limitations, and sure enough, they are yours to keep."

I really like to help people get past, and even burst through their limitations.

3 Important Principles to Keep in Mind

1. If you have an area of expertise, if you are an expert in something, then you can create products. All that a product is, simply, is your expertise in a sell-able form.

2. When you create and market your products, you turn the typical work model upside down. The typical work model is work once get paid, work once get paid, etc. The work model I learned from Tom Antion, my internet marketing and speaking mentor, is work once, get paid, paid, paid, paid, paid, paid.

3. When you create one product, keep this one work in mind - leverage. When you learn to leverage a product, you learn that one product can be several products. For example, when you write an e-book, -that e-book can also be a off-line book or booklet, an audio CD, a tele-seminar, part of a home study course, etc.

Internet marketing is still a complete mystery to a large majority of Internet users. For many net users, online marketing is seen as some foreign area of the web, populated with silly get-rich-quick schemes and unsavory characters ready to rip off the innocent and uninformed consumer at the click of a mouse.

In fact, Internet marketing could not be further removed from this unfaltering picture. In reality, Internet marketing is populated mainly with hard working professionals promoting and selling high quality brand products by many of the world's Top 500 companies.

Worldwide there are now over a billion Internet users, representing one large global consumer base or marketplace. The total amount of goods sold online has been steadily increasing each year as the Internet gains in both popularity and familiarity. Studies have shown people shop online because of lower prices, a wider selection of products, easier comparison shopping, and many just prefer not having to travel to stores to make a purchase.

Handling all this online e-commerce is a whole sector of companies, hosting providers, web designers, advertising agencies... and so on. All this online commerce has also given rise to a relatively new creature --- the professional Internet marketer. Someone who makes a lucrative living helping facilitate, in one form or another, all this online activity.

Still Internet marketing has gotten a raw deal.

If you mention to any group of professionals that you're an Internet Marketer and that you work full time on the Internet; you will receive some very skeptical looks and more than one arched eyebrow of disbelief.

Regardless of this lingering skepticism, Internet marketing has become a viable alternative for many disgruntled professionals dissatisfied with their working hours or conditions. It has become a viable alternative for many people from all walks of life, from the college student to the bored housewife to the retired doctor... all are enjoying a part time or full time income from the comfort of their homes.

And since the Internet is now practically available to everyone, anywhere in the world --- Internet marketing is a level playing field. Anyone can make a full time or part time income from the web if they truly desire it.

There are many forms of Internet marketing. There are many online business models you can follow. There are countless ways to earn a good honest income from the Internet. Which path you take will be largely determined by your own work habits, your background and what marketing style you're most comfortable with.

Here's a quick rundown of the most popular forms of Internet Marketing:

1. The Brick and Mortar Store Online

Most major companies and retail stores have created online versions of their brick and mortar businesses. Even if consumers don't buy online, many use these sites for gathering product information before buying in the real world. A factor many savvy businesses are exploiting in their overall marketing strategies.

2. Online Services

Many service industries have moved online, everything from travel to banking to dating! Again, the Internet can be a profitable extension for any service company.

3. Internet Products/Internet Gurus

Internet marketing has a whole history of pioneers who have forged the methods and techniques of marketing online - opt-in lists, mini-sites, article marketing, pay-per-click advertising, joint ventures... a brief history populated with such names as John Reese, Marlon Sanders, Ralph Wilson, Yanik Silver, Corey Rudl, Ken Evoy and countless others.

A whole new industry has grown around 'How-to' market online, info products, workshops and web seminars --- teaching people how to market on the Internet. A marketer creating his own product can prove very productive; as seen by John Reese's 2004 launch of Traffic Secrets, which earned over a million dollars in one day. (Without a penny of paid advertising!)

4. Online Advertising and Promotion

Pay-Per-Click advertising such as those offered by Google Adwords and other companies presents another viable marketing route. Keywords (the exact words typed into a search engine) fuel a large portion of the web's activity, keyword marketing has become a major driving force behind most of the economic transactions on the web. This is a very lucrative sector for those Internet marketers who know exactly what they're doing.

Then there is the whole section of SEO experts and consultants who command high prices for positioning companies or products in the top positions on the major search engines. Acquiring organic Top 10 search results (SERPs) will greatly determine the profitability of your online product or company.

5. Affiliate Marketing

One of the least understood, yet one of the most profitable forms of Internet marketing is affiliate marketing. An online marketer can join any affiliate program and promote its products or services on the Internet. You market the products, find customers for the company and receive a cut or commission for each sale you make from your marketing efforts. These commissions can run anywhere from 2% to over 50%. One affiliate click can earn you anywhere from a few cents to several hundreds of dollars.

Major third party affiliate programs or companies such as Commission Junction, LinkShare, Amazon, Shareasale... acts as a brokerage or go-between representing thousands of Top Brand companies such as Sony, Apple, Dell... to online affiliate marketers. Marketers can join a program such as Commission Junction or LinkShare and be able to promote and market hundred of top quality products or services online. They can consolidate their affiliate marketing through these third party programs.

Perhaps the most common business model for the majority of online marketers is the last example, or a combination of advertising and affiliate sales. Many work-from-home professionals have adopted this business model. They have created site or sites on the topic that interests them and of which they have or have gained some expert knowledge.

Once these sites become established and gathering a large amount of targeted web traffic each day, making a nice income can only be a matter of putting the Google Adsense code on their pages and placing a few appropriate affiliate links on their sites.

The more traffic these marketers deliver to their sites, the more income they earn. The more unique content they create, the more income they earn. The more web sites they design, the more income they earn.

What many people outside of the web marketing field fail to realize, the Internet is a 24/7/365 business. The Internet is always on and working for you. It is automatically producing income for you 24 hours of the day, while you're sleeping, while you're enjoying a nice meal with friends, or even while you're on vacation.

Internet marketing can provide you with a lifestyle that is totally liberating --- you can live and work anywhere in the world. You can be your own boss, set your own hours and work from the comfort of your own home. Plus your whole online Internet business can be automated so it basically runs itself.

Internet marketing is totally flexible. You can adjust your workload to suit your own work habits. Internet marketing is scalable, once you have learned how to make your first dollar, it is only a simple matter of repeating and scaling up what you did to earn that dollar. Computers and the Internet makes it just as easy to handle a thousand sales as it is to handle one sale.

As Internet marketing becomes better known, it will gradually earn more and more respect. It will become a well recognized profession that many will aspire to and follow as a life long career. Mainly because Internet marketing will give you the freedom rarely seen in any other profession.

It offers you mobility, a high standard of living, and a working environment that can't be beat. It gives you the freedom to follow your own interests and hobbies; all the while turning those interests into viable revenue streams that supports the lifestyle of your own choosing. When it is all said and done, earning a living just doesn't get any better than this.

If the recent Google update has made your site rankings plummet through the floor, it has probably left you gasping for breath. Hello, where did you go wrong? If you take a peek around the e-landscape you will see many warrior sites left spluttering for breath. The nature and scope of search engine optimization has undergone a sea-change with the recent Google update. The truth is that with every Google update, a good Internet marketing company should quickly re-think and re-strategize. So its no use singing Shaggy’s ‘It wasn’t me’ to the Google Gods. Stop trying to convince them that you didn’t use MFA (Made for Adsense) sites. The sooner you accept the truth, the better it is – MFA sites have become like Micheal Jackson in the world of search engine optimization – hot once, cold now.

Search Engine Optimization and MFA

If you have created an MFA site, then you have undoubtedly found yourself at the top of the rankings, or somewhere close enough, all this time. However, now any legit internet marketing company will inform you that a MFA site is on the search engine optimization hit list. The Big Brothers at Google are watching you very closely. It’s only a matter of time before you will be kaput – sandboxed, banned, or dropped from the SERPs – no Internet marketing company will be able to help your search engine optimization efforts.

So, as the wise men at search engine optimization say, better to quit while you are ahead. Drop the MFA, and continue going down the straight and the narrow of search engine optimization. Use traditional search engine optimization techniques like good SEO rich content – update it regularly and you will see rankings improve slowly and gradually. Get one way links from targeted themed sites, you know the search engine optimization routine…Be a good boy, and the search engine optimization gods will smile upon you once again. Don’t hesitate to employ an expert search engine optimization firm to do this for you.

Why MFA Sites Suck

After all, what use was your MFA site anyways? The purpose of a Made for Adsense site is placing ads, which might be of interested to users. Once a user clicks these ads, and makes a purchase, the site is paid a commission from the advertiser. This sounded like a good idea, till fishy search engine optimization firms took a good thing and tarred it black.

Scraping, cloaking, and other black hat techniques have made MFA sites fester like a sore wound for genuine search engine optimization firms and strategies. You see, these MFAs pages are targeted at particular keywords. When surfers enter such keywords in a search engine, they are directed to these pages, which appear to have useful content. Keyword stuffing, same color text, and other underhand techniques make these pages appear at the top of the search engine optimization rankings. However, users see only a list of ads, most of which are not even related to their initial keyword. Informational content is zilch, and usefulness is zero. In fact, most MFA sites are not even created by humans any more, but are created using scripts and other search engine optimization tricks.

As you can imagine, MFA sites ruin the quality of search engine results. What’s a guy to do when most sites open up as lousy MFA sites? You think such a surfer will ever use that search engine again? Unlikely.

Moreover, imagine the condition of an advertiser who has put his hard-earned dollars into an Adword or an AdSense? He thinks genuine buyers and prospects are exploring his services. However, the only people coming his way are surfers who have been tricked into clicking his ad. In summary, an Adword buyer is paying for accidental clicks. This is search engine optimization fraud, any which way you look at it.

MFA Fall Outs on Search Engine Optimization

Not only will your MFA site sink like a stone in the web morass, with it will go other black hats as well. For example, your landing pages. If you have noticed, Google has increased the bid values for AdWords. When sites used to bid on relatively cheaper AdWords, they had no problems redirecting clickers to their MFA sites. At such sites, every click would generate several dollars for the owner. So the ROI was fantastic – bid a few cents on an AdWord, and get several dollars in exchange. Who could resist that?

Now it’s a different story. Such MFA sites are re-evaluated according to the landing pages for the AdWord. Internet marketing firms now realize that such pages could tank the rankings of their sites, or even worse, get their site banned. SERPs have shown that the only way for legit AdWords sites to remain in the race is to junk the MFA – landing pages tie-up.

The fall out of the recent update is that black hat search engine optimization methods have excluded MFA sites and the AdWords landing pages of such sites.

How Does Google KNOW?

Its quite simple. They altered the algorithm slightly, and tweaked it so that only the legit sites remain visible at the top. In fact, as far back as December 2005, Google began recording the Quality Score of AdWords landing pages. Similar to the carrot and stick approach, spammy pages resulted in higher bid values of related keywords and lower scores.

Best Practices for Internet Marketing Firms

* Alter all MFA sites you own, ASAP. Replace the content with information about the keywords you have used. Its painful, its expensive, but its pays in the long run.
* Edit the Adwords landing pages to have some relevant content.
* Always use black hat with caution. If you are going to flirt with the law, be prepared for the sandbox.
* Ask a professional Internet marketing company for help – they are the experts, after all.

An Internet marketing company will bring with it knowledge, experience, and best of all, they know exactly how to remain just outside the danger zone. No one said search engine optimization was easy or simple. What is hot today becomes passé tomorrow. As an Internet marketing company, you need to be alert, agile, and very street smart to remain a step ahead in the rat race.

The number of emails which we send and receive each day is increasing at a staggering pace. Despite this increase, many businesses are not using the full potential of emails to promote and sell their products and services.

Recently, I asked one of my team to find a restaurant which used emails effectively as a part of their sales and marketing. It was hard, really hard.

Eventually he found an excellent example. The Landmarc Restaurant Theatre in Bournemouth runs a large number of special events. If bookings for a particular evening are slow then Josh Simons, Events Manager, checks his database of email addresses to find customers who may be interested in the event and he drops them a line – by email. The response can be almost instantaneous. A number of events which could have lost money have been saved by this simple and cost-effective approach.

It is easy to see how this approach could be used by pubs with live bands, travel agents looking for last minute bookings, a restaurant with a two for one offer and training companies with places to fill on a course.

Only minor adjustments would be needed to apply the idea to the launch of a new product or service or, as an example, for a heating engineer to offer a special price to customers who have their boiler serviced in the summer.

Now the idea of promoting these sorts of activities is not new and many companies use phone calls, direct mail and advertising to let their customers know what is on offer. The beauty of using email is that it is comparatively quick, cheap and easy to target. The following tips will help you to get started.

* Start collecting email addresses. Ask every customer and potential customer to opt-in to receive your newsletter and mailings about new products and offers. Opt-in email lists are really valuable because the recipients have said that they would like to hear from you.

* Make sure that you comply with all of the regulations relating to storing data and the use of email addresses. Key requirements in the UK include an obligation to notify the Information Commissioner’s Office that you are a Data Controller (2006 cost £35 per year), to ensure that, where an individual has an e-mail account, you only send emails to them if they have opted in and every email you send gives the recipient the opportunity to opt-out of receiving further emails from you and each email includes your contact details. For more details go to www.ico.gov.uk

* If you are sending out lots of emails, you may want to use a company which specialises in bulk mailings. They can help you to manage your email campaigns.

* Apply usual marketing good practice to your email campaigns – know what you want to achieve, stress the benefits to the customer, monitor results etc.

* Don’t abandon all other forms of sales and promotions. Email marketing can be very effective but it should be used in conjunction with other promotional and sales techniques.

Actually, I have already revealed a hint in the “summary” section of this article. Did you get it?

Number 1 – Get your list to look forward to your mails

How do you achieve that? Firstly, you should start off by giving good solid content/information that your list would be happy to receive. Stick to doing this and you will never fail! In addition to that, add a “teaser” that will get them looking forward to your next mail. An example: “In the next issue, I will be revealing the single top most error made by email marketers and why you are still committing it! Do away with this and you can expect to at least have a 50% increase in response”

Number 2 – Craft a killer subject line

This should be the part you spend most time mulling over simply because it is that important to your whole email marketing efforts! No matter how good your email copy is, it won’t get read unless you have a good headline. One of the many tricks I can reveal is the “curiosity factor”. Humans are innately curious and just by piquing their curiosity you can create an “itch” in them – they would have no choice but to open your mails. An example: “I saw you the other day…”, “Did you mention something like that?”, “This is your own. I am giving it to you now”

Number 3 – Be consistent

If you are consistent your list will know what to expect and would easily recognize your mail. Whether it’s the “from” field or the way you write your messages, they recognize you and will eventually grow familiar to you.

Number 4 – Keep your list happy!

It may sound simple but it is harder then it seems! Keep asking them what they want and, as far as possible, give it to them. Pamper them, make they feel good. This way, when you actually send a promotional email, they will be more responsive to it because you have already gained their trust.

If you have a website it makes sense to create a product to sell on your website. It does not have to be complicated but it does need to be something that people will enjoy and do desire.

Most websites do not offer products and yet one has to wonder why, because it does not take much to start offering a product and there are so many products that you can offer. It simply makes no sense to have a website or industry portal, which has nothing to sell people, who maybe very interested in buying something.

Monetarizing a website is not difficult and you can do this simply by adding links. It is equally as easy with product creation and then offering your product on your website. You can start by enhancing brand if you have a lot of traffic, sell T-shirts, hats and knick knacks; this is such an easy way to start. Product creation is not so difficult and if you outsource most of it, you may find that your out of pocket costs to make the offer is next to nothing up front, meaning why wouldn’t you do it?

Perhaps you might sit down with a pen and paper or survey your current Internet viewers and consider all the possible things you might offer. What makes sense, what is easy to produce and what requires the least out of pocket expense to set up; then do that and work from there.

The field of information products is a highly competitive and often junked-up online business model, because of the ease of entry. In the last year or so, mass availability of easy-to-use book publishing tools, audio and video creators, and the ease of distribution has really made this field attract anyone who thinks they know something about a field, and a desire to make an extra buck.

The bottom line with creating, and especially making money from, information products, is to create the very best. There are a lot of lousy information products online which are comprised of old rehashed information, and clog up the information market online.

However, because information products have become so easy to create, they make an excellent entry-level field online for the beginner.

So how do you get started?

First, you must identify what you are really good at. What do you know a lot about and are willing and interested in learning more about? The reason I say interested in learning more about is because without the interest, the field will soon grow old. There are so many great topics for online profit that you might as well find something that really interests you.

Second, learn everything you can about that topic. Don’t just start with what you know, go out and learn more. Become an expert in your field. If you are already an expert, be sure you are completely up to date on new developments in your field.

Third, study the market. What types of information would be useful to someone without your experience, but are not readily available online? Anything that fits that category is probably a good place to start in the information world.

Fourth, determine how to disseminate the information. Is it conducive to putting out in the form of a book, or even a digital, downloadable book form like an ebook? Is it information that is more readily available audibly? Is there an advantage to actually being able to see you talk about or demonstrate a process, and therefore a candidate for development as a video or video feed?

Fifth, once you have developed your initial product you will need to let the online world know about it. You will need a web site and you will need a steady stream of visitors to your site, where they can view and purchase your new product.

Sixth, you must position yourself as an expert in your field, and consistently stay ahead of new product developments. As new products arise on the market, you may need to make adjustments to your product, or develop additional products to meet additional needs.

Website linking can come in many forms and each one has a different strategy. Each strategy has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Learning these different strategies can definitely help a webmaster obtain better search engine rankings and even more importantly, increased website traffic.

1. Reciprocal link exchanges – This strategy of generally the choice for start-up websites, which have a very small advertising budget. On short term this can produce quite noticeable effects, but it is thought that in the long term they may be more of a hindrance than a benefit.

2. Obtaining media attention (Press Releases)– This is a more advanced technique of obtaining back links. The principle is simple though: You post a press release or better still you launch a press release campaign and then you await for it to be published. The results can be quite dramatic, as the most successful press releases can generate thousands of quality links. The main obstacle is to obtain the media attention to begin with. Journalists require press releases that are interesting and newsworthy. A sales pitch type of press release will get you nowhere. Also you must make it easier for journalists to find your press release by posting it in as many profile sites as possible.

3. Writing articles – This is a very powerful method of obtaining back links. The basic idea is that you post an article which contains at least a link to your website, to other sites such as article directories (e.g. EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com etc) and give others the right to republish the article for absolutely for free, with the basic condition that they will not modify the article itself and that they will give you credit for it. Remember just about every webmasters is constantly on the search for fresh content.

4. Buying links – This is the last method I propose. For this strategy to be successful you must have quite a large budget. The advantages are quite obvious. What you see is what you get. When using this method though, please check the page where the link is located has the page rank it’s supposed to have, that the link doesn’t have the “no follow” tag attached and that the link is permanent.

5. Link Directories – This is a better way of producing links, although it does have its drawbacks. It is vitally important to make sure you choose only those directories that do not require a reciprocal link. Some of the more “unscrupulous” directories don’t actually give you a “direct” link back to your site, but do a redirect through some internal files on their sites. Although human visitors can still navigate to your site, search engines will not regard it as a link pointing to your site.

Also it is also advisable to stay away from badly organized directories, as these tend to be considered “bad neighborhood” links and can cause some serious damage on the long run. As a whole though, this technique is very powerful as it allows even start up websites to obtain decent one-way links.

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.