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Here are some very serious questions that I've been asked about search engine positioning. How much traffic can search engine positioning generate? Is search engine optimization worth my time to pursue? Is it cost-effective? These are legitimate questions that our subscribers have asked about this popular marketing practice.

Back in 1996, I discovered how important top rankings were in the major search engines. As a business owner who admittedly started his company from his home and on a "shoe string" budget, I didn't have the luxury of a big advertising budget. Fortunately, by marketing our site through the search engines, we generated thousands of dollars in sales while spending zero in advertising dollars. This helped a great deal to get the business off the ground.

Many of you who have used WebPosition Gold for search engine optimization know what a tremendous return on investment it yields. However, recently I've read an article or two suggesting that search engine positioning may no longer be a wise use of online marketing dollars. As a marketing veteran, this really shouldn't surprise me.

Everyone knows that controversy sells magazines and newspapers. However, for someone to suggest that search engine positioning is not an important use of an online marketing budget when I know so many people who had proven otherwise was just too much to stomach.

Therefore, I contacted Fredrick Marckini, the CEO of iProspect.com, one of the most successful search engine positioning agencies in the country and the company that wrote the book on search engine positioning called "Secrets to Achieving Top 10 Rankings."

Knowing he was a recognized expert in this field, I asked him if he would discuss some client case studies and share some of his firm's insider research. I also asked him to reveal some search engine positioning tips that our readers would find valuable. I was pleasantly surprised by the wealth of information he produced.

I asked iProspect.com to share some specific client success stories that would demonstrate the real-world value of search engine positioning. I have received testimonials from many satisfied users of WebPosition Gold and they talk about specific rankings and increases in traffic that their search engine positioning efforts have generated -- but I could not have anticipated the examples provided by iProspect.com. These examples clearly demonstrated, on a much larger scale, the true power of search engine positioning.

iProspect.com's contracts contain non-disclosures so we must respect their clients' right to privacy. We will discuss them and their online businesses by their business category, what they sell, their industry and/or the nature of their sites' only.

One of these clients operates an e-commerce site that sells automobile parts. What makes this case study so interesting is that this particular company has never used any other online advertising; not banner ads, not e-mail marketing, nor print or television advertising. Their entire online marketing campaign consisted of search engine positioning, and they engaged iProspect.com from launch through to today. This Web site, through search engine positioning alone, is now transacting $250,000 per month in sales. They are on-track to hit $3 million dollars in sales this year. According to iProspect.com, these visitors can only be coming from search engine referrals.

Another iProspect.com client operates a number of technical content Web sites. According to Fredrick Marckini, iProspect.com increased their rankings from 2,041 top-30 rankings to 13,338 total top-30 rankings in a five month period - and that counted only those keywords and phrases that they were tracking, not the many incidental and accidental rankings that such a large-scale effort undoubtedly creates. Their site's traffic from search engines topped 238,000 visitors per month.

The successes represented by these case studies are certainly noteworthy. While solid outcomes can be expected when you employ an expert services firm like iProspect.com, marketers should look to wider industry validation before making decisions about new marketing methods such as search engine positioning.

Therefore, I asked iProspect.com what studies and statistics they had tracked about the value of search engine positioning that validates this marketing method. Yet again, they had done their homework. As you would guess, the analyst and industry support for search engine positioning was solid.