For affiliate marketers or webmasters who started a few years ago, pay per click marketing was the thing. Pay your price per click (PPC), measure this against how many clicks it would take to create a purchase and then calculate your relevant profit. But as time moved on, more and more entrepreneurs and corporations saw the benefits of PPC, pushed the price of clicks up to the extent, that is it no longer cost affective in certain industries to use, unless you have a high margin of return.

In many cases the only way forward now, is to try and get some free traffic from normal listings. So search engine optimisation (SEO) has now become more important than ever to balance out the costs of advertising.

You would think all you had to do was buy a book, learn the skills and apply to your website, but it isnt that easy. First of all, the search engines do not tell you what the recipe is for a top place. They will tell you some rules what not to do, but all this does is guaranteed you will listed, probably somewhere down at number 789 or so.

SEO is a skill that can only be learned by trial and error. Find someone who has made the errors and find someone who has been successful and learn from them. I say this because search engines like Google tend to change their algorithm every now and again, without any warning or knowledge of what they will be doing. It is not uncommon for a regular first page web page being taking down many pages in one swoop. The only way to keep abreast is to join some of the many SEO forums and hear it as it happens. It is almost like watching the news sometimes.

I have spent probably the last 18 months or so reading, learning and then adapting, making mistakes, getting successes then, falling lower in the rankings and staying there, then regaining again. The bottom line is, SEO can be a roller coaster ride and no-one should assume that once you have got the desired slot, you will stay there forever or even more than a day.

SEO requires continuous effort and time, study, training and much patience. It is no wonder, that respectable SEO companies charge a small fortune to keep your site high in the rankings, because of the time, up to date knowledge that is required. Anyone who does SEO on the cheap, either works for love or does not know the size of the challenge.

If you want to know how competitive SEO, the next time you do a search on any search engine, just look at how many websites or pages are competing for 10 places on the first page. Take the word SEO for instance. 175m, yes that is 175 million pages fighting for one of 10 slots on Google, granted multiple pages may be from one site and may be related to more specific search terms, but you get my point.

SEO is a rich get richer and the poor get poorer scenario. There are 10 rich people in the world and just fewer than 75 million poor ones. However it has to be said that SEO is here to stay and until the internet is replaced with something else, this will probably be the deciding factor whether you business will make a profit or not.