In recent years, the use of multimedia contents (image, audio, video and text) is rapidly increasing with the high growth and widespread use of the Internet and information technology. Due to this fact, tampering and illegal distribution of digital contents is inevitable because of their digital nature and as such it becomes imperative to devise mechanisms to protect such contents. Several mechanisms that have been proposed for data hiding are cryptography, steganography and watermarking. One of such mechanisms that have been attracting major interest is digital watermarking as it provides one of the best solutions among the proposed mechanisms. This is because watermarking has given an effective ways of data copyright protection or illegal duplication of digital data. Watermarking is a technique that is used to preclude duplicating or to shield digital data by imperceptibly hiding authorized sign information into the original data. The major challenge of watermarking technique is to optimally achieve a balance between imperceptibility and robustness. In order to attain this fit many researchers have proposed and developed different algorithms to this regards. This paper survey various watermarking algorithm for protection of digital data with a view to achieving optimal trade-off between imperceptibility and robustness. Performance and limitations some of the previous works are identified. Finally, future investigations to improve on some of the observed inadequacies are discussed.