The trend of getting found or to say it in marketing term: website reach and visibility has changed for the last few years. If once we could just rank on the first or second page on the search engine result pages by only including the right keywords on the page or probably also in the header and title tags, now the time is much different.

Despite the trend now goes to social media and networking sites, search engines still are the source of qualified traffic that none of us should overlook.

According to Forrester Research, search marketing now accounts for 39 percent of all online advertising spending. By 2010, the number is expected to rise to 44 percent. So actually it is bullish. More online business owners are going to pay attention to search — both the organic search engines and paid search.

You might as well have seen advertising that guarantee top placement in hundreds, if not thousands of search engines for $20. If you can get listed in so many search engines for next to nothing and immediately get streams of traffic, why this blog afterall?

Well, unfortunately, it never is that simple anymore. Search engine optimization is a bit complicated but I should say well within every website publisher’s capability if he/she follows the right path.

The fact is, there are only four big players in the search engine world — Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask. Other tiny search systems probably won’t get you a single visitor for weeks or even months so why waste your time on those?

This blog focuses on providing search marketing information for small business, independent professionals, small or even solo web publisher websites. While it is not necessary to spend a dime in advertising, it helps if you have some budget to spend to speed up getting results from search engine optimization. The choice is yours.

And no, you don’t even have to own a gigantic budget to rank on the first page. But, it is also important not to compete with Coca Cola for that term because even how hard we try, chances are we have zero chance of winning.

The key is niche marketing. There are endless amount of niches to tap into. The Internet is a global market that once an obscure niche could become an entirely lucrative business because suddenly there are crowds of people who pay attention to the same thing and are interested in them.

Search engine optimization is important to building a website that gets traffic from organic search engines. The vast majority of sites don’t have a chance, simply because they don’t follow the basic rules. They don’t target specific keywords. They don’t understand how to structure site pages. They don’t realize the role of inbound links.

Understanding these concepts could mean success and failure, winning heads and shoulders above your competitions.

More and more, search engines are looking for theme sites with very focused content. Those sites weigh more than general portal sites.

So, it is very important to keep from expanding too fast. Stay narrow. Once you have successfully dominate or at least gain a strong foundation, then expand to a wider topic related to your original niche.

Staying focus on less competitive niche is key to rank for smaller online publishers. If you follow this rule, you will see nothing but stronger growth of traffic due to better rankings in search engines.

There are a lot of basics and nitty gritty to cover, so make sure you subscribe to these resources to stay up-to-date with tips, tricks, strategies and last but obviously not the last — motivation.