When one reads through various books, articles and reports on Internet Marketing experts often sight the importance of “Search Engine Optimization” or “SEO”. It seems that there is not universal agreement on how best to achieve good SEO.

There are firms that specialize in improving your site’s SEO for a fee. There are others that claim that you can get a highly ranked website by simply employing some absolutely free tricks. One way or another it can all seem a bit like Black Magic, Hocus Pocus, or the Internet Marketers Two Step.

It can certainly give you a headache trying to figure it all out. It might seem that there is some kind of magic formula that is known only to a few.

Even new marketers will recognize the importance of having a well ranked website. Clearly most traffic to sites does come from search engines. So, it follows then that having a website placed within the first 10 search results on the first page of a search engines returns for a specific search query is important.

Ah! but there’s the rub and the first point of controversy. Is Search Engine Optimization all that it’s cracked up to be? After all, how can any single marketer achieve consistently high ranking when there are simply millions of competing websites? This is also the point were there is a division between various marketers as to how be to design a marketing strategy.

These differences in strategy make a considerable difference to the approach one will use in marketing online. The strategy any marketer will employ has to do with exactly how search engines work and what resources that marketer can use in adopting a specific marketing approach or technique.

Termed another less delicate manner the strategy you adopt is pretty much determined by how much you are prepared to spend. If the product or service you’re selling is in direct competition with large corporations or well funded marketers, competing for search engine ranking could be a very expensive proposition.

There’s certainly no magic formula buying advertising that puts your ad at the top of a search page. Pay per click advertising is the mainstay of many marketing campaigns. But for those with limited budgets achieving a high placement as a result of so called “natural” search results is the only way to be competitive without spending a bundle.

It’s redundant to say that search engines designed to find the closest matches to what you’re looking for. Anyone that’s ever used one to find very specific information understands that getting the information you want can be somewhat frustrating. The more exacting you need to be often the less precise the search results become.

The Search engines work is based on some complicated algorithms. The exact processes or search method that a specific search engine uses are actually closely guarded secrets.

It is fairly well accepted however that search engines give preference to search top level domains which most closely match the parameters of search query.

It thought that marketers can gain a tremendous competitive advance by registering a domain name which will likely match the search results for a specific search term. This principal is the foundation to the Niche Marketing model.

Niche Marketing is based on the idea that marketers can research a specific niche market then register a domain name or names based on what prospective customers in that market will be searching for. The idea behind this is that any search done for key words with are most relevant to that niche market will likely cause a website using a domain name that is rich in those keywords to appear high in the search results.

Niche marketing is of course an integral part of many marketing strategies and the sole focus of some. However, registering a “niche specific, key word rich domain name, isn’t the whole story. As already noted search engines are designed to return results which closely match the search parameters of the searcher.

In other words simply having a good domain name isn’t enough. The focus of search engine development has been on returning search results for sites which are relevant to the parameters of the search. That is to say that while the domain name might be important site content has become equally important to being highly ranked.

This certainly makes sense for when you consider that the whole point of using a search engine is to find exactly what you’re looking for. There a large number of search engines on the net and each will use on of several common search methods. Some use a technique called indexing, others crawl the sites for each search, some look at headers, some give weight to popularity, others less so.

In 2004 “Hakia” a Manhattan based company announced that the launch of a new “meaning-based” search engine. The objective of this new engine is to improve search relevancy and interactivity for users. The obvious benefits of a search engine using this type of search method” is that it would, “in theory” return a more accurate or relevant search result especially to very specific queries.

With the launch of Hakia, along with many other similar developments from competing search engines it’s becoming clearer that in the future website content will become even more important to success in internet marketing than ever before. Perhaps socially relevant is a term that might also be applied with the rise of social bookmaking or the so called “social integration” of the web.

No matter what technique a marketer employs it would be foolish not to recognize that search engines are the driving force behind all internet marketing. It’s equally important to recognize the need to understand how to create web sites and web pages that search engines will find to be most relevant.

Quality Content while always important is essential to achieving good results with any marketing campaign. With that point in mind marketers should take a close look at Jonathan Legers new site Quality Content

Marvin Double is a writer and internet marketer. He brings 35 years of offline business experience to the internet marketing community. Please visit his blog at Monkeeze Marketing Blog