A colleague sent me a great article this morning, and it raises some very interesting possibilities. I struggle to help smaller etailers understand the difficulty of establishing a meaningful presence in organic (free) search engine results on Google, Yahoo, MSN and the like. You can do everything right with your site and still not make much headway because of the importance that search engines place on inbound links from "authority" sites. In other words, if you don't have popular, quality information sites linking to your site, customers won't find you in search engine results pages (SERPs).

It's very difficult for a small to medium size business to get inbound links from legitimate authority sites.

Here's what Jason Prescott says in Is Google Killing SEO?

Paid search listings could become more relevant than organic listings because of the emphasis on inbound links in search algorithms

He goes on to say:

Google's paid search algorithm acts almost like a rating system. Google will discover the most popular sites based on user preferences, allowing it to serve highly relevant results based on paid search landing pages. As a result, search engines will likely start serving more sponsored links, and the organic links will start to fade away.

Does this mean even small businesses must run large paid search campaigns with thousands of keywords to get found online? Not yet. The answer for many businesses may be to find a quality vertical search site for their industry. If your customer base is in a tight enough niche, this may be the best way to get quality traffic. If the vertical search site is also rich in quality information related to your business, then guess what--you've found the ultimate authority site to boost your organic search rankings.