If you are an online marketer, you have been told that search engine optimization (SEO) is the most effective way to get free organic traffic to your website. I disagree!

Certainly SEO is a critical component of anyone’s online marketing strategy, and you should structure your website accordingly, but it is no longer the “holy grail” of online marketing. In today’s online economy, Google is only one of several viable resources where you can acquire free organic traffic.

This is exciting if you have an online business, because it means you don’t have to be on the first page of Google to succeed. You just need to be wherever your prospects are congregating online.

I once attended a seminar by internet marketing guru David Frey, where he gave this piece of advice: “if you want to succeed online, be where the people are.” In other words, if you stand in front of a large crowd of people, as the crowd walks past you, some of them are going to stumble over you. If enough people stumble over you, you can make a huge income from your online business.

Five years ago, Google was the only game in town. You had to show up on the first two pages of the Google search results if you expected to get free traffic to your website. Today more people conduct searches on Social Websites than they do using the Google search engine.

Don’t get me wrong, Google can send you massive amounts of free traffic if you are on the first page of the search results, but most online businesses can get more traffic from Web 2.0 sites.

Jeff Johnson, a recognized internet marketing guru, best described this online marketing strategy at a seminar I attended. He coined the online marketing term as ‘Breadcrumb Marketing’. This strategy is to market throughout the internet where people in your niche market congregate, and leave a trail of breadcrumbs leading back to your website.

If you follow this strategy and promote where your niche market congregates, you can drive huge amounts of free traffic to your website. In today’s online world, people congregate and search on Web 2.0 websites like MySpace, YouTube, and Technorati.

Let me repeat what I said in the beginning of this article: this is exciting if you have an internet marketing business, because Google no longer controls your success, you do. The next step is for you to define and execute an internet marketing strategy that takes advantage of these new trends brought on by Web 2.0 sites.