Its no secret that I've said before that SEO is dead.

Well, it's still a massive industry and companies pay SEOs big bucks to try and push their websites onto the first page of Google.

The fact that it's not worth doing unless you're in the #1 – #3 spot is not talked about at client meetings; nor is the fact that there is no point in starting to do SEO until you know what keywords work for your business and the best, quickest, cheapest way to do this is buy traffic…

Here are some great resources from Aaron Walls SEOBook website that, if you can be bothered to take a look, will explain some of the nuances of working with the Google 'smoke and mirrors machine'.

A Look at How Organic Links Have Lost Value

Over the years Google has moved to "fight spam" at the same time Google's business development team has pushed to "make spam." The combination of those 2 (& pulling in additional non-link relevancy signals) has lowered the value of organic links.

Make sure you check out all the graphics at

http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/

I'm stunned that a company the size of JC Penney has seemingly blundered into the SEO world so recently.

I would have a expected them to have been honing and refining their search engine optimization strategy and the rankings that go with it for years.

However, from the article I'm about to link you too, it seems that they have very recently decided to 'boost' their search engine results and done it way to quickly and overwhelmingly.

Sadly, they will bring all sorts of attention to themselves; Google see this a mile off; and now they have been publicly slapped by G.

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Not nice is it JCP (the slap); check it out here

Well hardly surprising really but the chaps at Google must be rubbing their hands with glee. Why?

It's estimated Google’s full-year search advertising revenue last year rose 20 percent to $25.4 billion.

That's $25,400,000,000.00 folks.

This gave Google a market share of 83 percent in 2010, up from 81 percent in 2009.

Well hoohar! But that's not a bigger market share in number of customers is it? Oh no, they've been kicking paying customers off their platform in the thousands.

The greater market share comes from the big players; those with enormous, so big we dare not track roi and who the hell cares any way old boy advertising budgets.

Read full report here.

Well Google doesn’t like you to use their maps api unless you pay them 10 grand for enterprise use, so we decided to go a slightly different route. The problem was that G blocked the service to our IP address for 24 hours after repeatedly using the service. Thanks G!

 Instead of using the API we used the Google maps online service, passing the address as part of a query string and then parsing the results. Although this is a pain to have to parse the resulting html from the maps.com service, it still works and the results ate consistent, although, be aware, the lat and long results from the API are different than from maps.com!

Here’s how to do it in .NET

‘first we create a request Dim req As HttpWebRequest = CType(WebRequest.Create(“http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=map&output=js&q=” + paddress), HttpWebRequest) req.Method = “POST” ‘set the content length of the string being posted ‘create the stream amd write it and close req.ContentLength = 0 req.ContentType = “text/xml”‘now get the response Dim res As HttpWebResponse = CType(req.GetResponse(), HttpWebResponse) ‘read it into a stream and close Dim sr As New System.IO.StreamReader(res.GetResponseStream) PostGEOOut = sr.ReadToEnd

I’ve been working on a project using the Google maps API recently. I’ve been using it to return the latitude and longtitude of an address and then comparing it against a geo-coded file in a database.

The Google maps API is pretty extensive and fairly easy to use. However, there are some things that you need to be aware of. The first thing is that Google does not want you to use the GClientGeocoder object to geo-code large files. If you want to do that, they want you to sign-up for an enterprise version of the geo-coder, and the cost is an astounding $10,000!

More on that in a later post. For now, here’s a map to play with…

As, you can see, it’s pretty easy to insert a map. You need to get an API key from here. Once you have that, you’re pretty much up and running.

I’ll post some more on the API later and show you some AJAX code that returns the latitude and longtitude results back to the server side for processing.