As more businesses are taking to the web, Internet marketing is becoming the most talked-about topic at boardroom meetings.

For starters, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO (as it is commonly referred to as), is the process of improving the natural search ranking of your website. Various tactics can be employed to improve a website's page ranking, but it all boils down to how well you're able to “bait the fish.”

Each search engine has a crawler, or spider, that scours the Internet for webpages. Each spider carries a log of all the websites it visits, and should the website meet the requirements of the search engine, the site is recorded. Each search engine has more or less the same requirements, but Google and Yahoo! have specific details that separate the two, thus allowing for different results when the same keyword is searched on both engines. Google claims that its search engine is able to provide more relevant results than the others, but then again, everyone claims that they're better than the competition.

As a web designer, keywords, webpage layouts, title tags, and meta tags (text that is seen by a search engine, but not by Internet users) all play an important role in improving your natural search ranking. So, if you can imagine, it didn't take long before businesses started realizing that there was money to be made by offering SEO services to other companies. Services are available for improvements across all search engines, or specifically tailored to one individual engine. The result is the same: each company comes up with their own secret method of improving a ranking by playing with website copy, layouts, and tags.

Aside from those who believe that there is money to be made in SEO, there are those whose sole purposes in life is to trick the system. The Internet is a big place, and just because you can find one individual who follows the rules of SEO religiously, doesn't mean that the 99 others who try to abuse the system don't exist. In fact, there have been many cases of people who have adopted unethical practices to push their websites to the top. One example being repeatedly using a popular keyword such as “sex” for a “home improvement” website in order to boost the overall ranking of the site. The result was irrelevant search results for people actually searching for sex on the Internet.

As a search engine, your job is to provide the most relevant searches to any user. As a result, Google and Yahoo! have spent countless hours to improve their own search engine algorithms to combat unethical SEO practices. These constant improvements boil down to more demanding and specific requirements from websites, thus making it more difficult for legitimate SEO services providers. And in a business sense, this translates a bigger price tag.

So will there still be a demand for Search Engine Optimization when the price is ridiculously high? That remains to be seen.