When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: natural search engine optimization and a pay-per-click program.

In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site’s profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it’s usually better to focus on one or the other.

But which is best for you?

New research from eMarketer shows that people are still searching online for travel, in many cases above all else, in spite of the credit crunch.

According to a recent study, of the nearly seven million Spaniards who’ve shopped online in 2008, nearly two-thirds used their time online to search for travel and accommodations. Second-most searched for were tickets to movies, theatres, and concerts, but this had significantly less search at only 36 percent.

Another study shows that in the US, the Hispanic population is beginning to go online in big numbers: over 40 percent of US Hispanics shopped online this year. And travel was the top category they researched. As Hispanics look set to represent 1/6 of the US population by 2010, this is not a category to be overlooked, and they continue to be underserved by Spanish-language sites.

Greig Holbrook, MD of www.obanmultilingual.com, gives his predictions for the future of search engine marketing in the travel and tourism industry.

Without doubt there are going to be at least two major changes to search over the next 18 months. These changes will have real and major effects on the travel industry.

Multilingual SEO/SEM is set to grow rapidly over the next 18 months; this is due to:

•    Rising levels of competition in English (making it much harder for travel sites to achieve decent return on investment within the English-speaking world).
•    The numbers of internet users overseas rising extremely quickly, especially in the case of China, where there are more internet users than the US. Chinese users also spend more time online now than in the US too.
•    Huge increases in online spend on travel overseas. For example, the French and Germans now spend more on online travel than in the UK.

With the travel industry already feeling the pain of the economic downturn, Google on Wednesday convened more than a hundred travel marketing executives at TravelThink 2008 to offer strategies for boosting business, as well as to get feedback.

As one of the industries to embrace search early on, travel has become a key business category for Google, and the search giant plays a big role in driving business to travel companies large and small. Penry Price, vice president for advertising sales, North America for Google, described how search is a core consumer behavior in the travel industry, and how new technologies can create new ways to reach customers.

An excerpt from the ideahatching.com Blog discussing Google’s plans for marketing destinations on YouTube, and the implications for users of the primarily user-generated video sharing site.