I do not spend that much time doing social networking. I do blog and social bookmark, but I hardly ever go to a Social site such as Facebook or Twitter. I do still enjoy the search engine traffic I get however. I happen to believe that search engines still do matter to your Internet business.

Here's why!

When I look at my Google Analytics stats I see that over half of my traffic comes every day from search engines. Now granted I have spent a lot of time in the past couple of years mastering search engine optimization techniques and targeting keyword phrases in the forms of blog posts, article marketing, and inner web pages.

What is interesting is how many of the these still continue to bring me traffic long after I have initially written them. I have found that you can literally be on page 1 of Google for hundreds of keywords if you do it properly. And once you get there you can stay if you are targeting lesser searched keywords. These are phrases that contain several keywords. Sometimes they are referred to as longtail keyword phrases.

The problem I have with social networking is the time that it takes to do it on a daily basis. I know people who do very well in social networks such as MySpace, Facebook and Direct Matches. They personally relate to this type of marketing and have learned how to do it successfully.

However, this seems to be a more difficult way to develop long term traffic. If you are not active you are going to get forgotten.

It could be a great way to make contacts for network marketing businesses or joint ventures so you have to decide what your goals are with your business.

However, in the long run it still is beneficial to have traffic coming to you via search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are just too large of companies to ignore. One way that does work are article marketing.

Getting a lot of articles online in the top directories can really pay off in traffic and search engine bait. Of course you have to learn how to write articles or hirer someone to write for you.

However you do it figuring out ways to enjoy some of this search engine traffic is good for your business.