In a recent online survey conducted by TopRank Online Marketing, 36% of 400 business marketers polled said they will surely focus their Internet marketing campaigns on SEO over the next six months. Blogging emerged second with 33% of the votes while pay per click ranked third with 26%.

These results showed that online marketers are steadily learning the ropes in search engine optimization. As many SEO specialists would say, there is no sure or fixed formula to make sure that your website tops the search engine results page permanently. Keyword research, keyword insertion, the utilization of meta tags, and so on contribute to boosting your page ranking but SEO is as elusive to any beginner as with anyone who is doing it for years.

Perhaps the reason why business marketers put great value to SEO is because it offers a long-time potential for growth unlike with say, PPC ads, wherein your campaigns are given a definite start and end period. Search engines are the most widely used Internet tools around the world so it has the potential to drive bulk of the traffic to websites.

Online tools are readily available to determine which combinations work best and which do not. SEO must be used as part of a far larger social media optimization campaign because the combination of the two has proven to be very powerful.

Blogs is perhaps the modern form of magazines and newspapers. The emergence of special blog search engines such as Technorati.com just goes to show how blogs keep on growing in popularity. Blogs are easy to manage and update. They could be used as a medium to relay useful information related to your business. Blogging as been around for years and are expected to stay around in the long-term.

Try looking and there are blogs created especially for several industries – news, music, videos, pharmaceuticals, food, travel, and so on. They have truly become a popular way to earn money online. Creating a supporting blog for your original website or websites, if you have more than one, is another way to generate backlinks to your site.

If you are managing a blog, you also have the option to build a link neighborhood with other bloggers of the same category. A relevant link neighborhood helps boost your page rank in search engines like Google and Yahoo, which is good for your Internet marketing campaign.

Internet marketers could also use blogs to place their banner and text ads. There are a number of online programs nowadays that offers bloggers a fee for allowing ads on their sites. Pay-per-post campaigns, on the other hand, make use of bloggers’ writing skills to come up with relevant content to promote the advertisers.

Why is it Effective?

Online marketing is very effective because if done properly, it allows internet marketers the opportunity to relay their message to a wider market, global if you may, without having to empty their bank accounts. What’s better is, no matter how many million people read or view the ads, the medium allows a more personalized experience for every Internet user.

For instance, online advertisements shown are usually based on the search keywords typed in by a user, say in Google.com. This gives the ads a stronger appeal because they are targeted to those who are most interested in them. Internet marketers should keep this in mind when coming up with a general framework for their online marketing strategy.

Internet marketing is also effective because it is flexible and easily measurable. Internet marketers have the option to employ a combination of two or more online marketing strategies and shift to other models every now and then to find out which is most effective for their campaign. The results of online marketing initiatives can be easily mapped and tracked, an advantage not seen in traditional forms of marketing.