In the real world, clients want to talk about search engines, search engine optimization or search engine marketing (Google Adwords / Pay-Per-Click).

Why? The current economic downturn is having an impact on businesses and with the majority of people now using Google (mainly) to find information on an all subjects across the board, many organizations are re-evaluating their online marketing and website strategy. It’s an area that clients in every market are asking for advice on.

Many are now concerned by their visibility to prospective customers. Businesses that previously saw a website as an online brochure are waking up to the fact that online they’re completely invisible to those searching online for the products and services that they offer. Not a good place to be at the best of times, but a business killer in a recession.

These same clients also recognize another huge challenge. Failing to act now to improve visibility will leave them even farther behind their competition when the economy starts to grow again. This fact is compounded by the changes in the search engine world over the last 18 months of many people are completely unaware. These include Universal Search in Google over the longer term and more recent changes to local search in Google.

Search engine marketing isn’t a one off activity. It requires constant attention, tweaking and monitoring, which is true of both Search Engine Optimization (the free organic listings) and Search Engine Marketing (Google Pay-Per-Click etc).

The best place to start is with an audit of where you are, what are they key words and phrases that are being used by prospects and how well are you currently ranking. Here are some questions to consider;

1. Has your website been built with optimization in mind?
2. What can you do in the short, medium and long term?
3. How are you going to grow links?

It’s also vital to ensure that your paid and natural search is properly co-ordinated. Increasingly, you also need to think about online PR and drive coverage on social media sites, which can both benefit SEO.

Now is the time to act, before your competitors either beat you to it or get so far ahead of you that you’ll never catch up. From what I’ve seen in the local search markets in some industries, there is already a war going on.

Face the challenges of search engine marketing and search engine optimization head on. With the demise of printed media it is increasingly important to stake your claim in the search engine soil. It can be time consuming (especially at the start) but once you begin you can very quickly see improvements in your rankings. Very soon you can also see the benefit on the bottom line with more visitors, more subscribers and more sales!

Start with a $97 FREE Search Engine Ranking Report
and Review of Your Current Web Site
& Get More Traffic Today!

Just click the button to get started!

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Do we have to expect a larger ranking algorithm update? Will this change the ranking of your web pages in Google’s search results?

Here’s an overview of what I’ve noticed and what has been reported by webmasters in forums recently:

1. Some established websites that did not spam dropped out of Google’s index early March.
2. It seems to take much longer now until new websites get indexed by Google.
3. Rather less relevant results have received higher rankings because some relevant pages either dropped out of the index or lost some of their inbound links.
4. The Cache data doesn’t seem to be updated.

The site: and inurl: queries on Google that normally fluctuate for large websites now report the same numbers every day.

Changes like these are usually a clear indicator of an upcoming ranking algorithm update.

Is this really a ranking algorithm update?

Google engineer Matt Cutts denied that there are any major changes in the search results and that there was a ranking algorithm update on the way.

However, he wanted to investigate if and why the results change so much.

The observations of the webmasters in the forum might be normal changes that happen all the time. But the webmasters who discovered the changes are very web-savvy and they should be able to distinguish an anomaly from usual fluctuations.

I’ve heard on some of the paid search forums that it has to do with Google implementing more of it’s Latent Semantic Indexing algorithm. This makes sense of what I’ve seen recently and I’m in the process of updating some of my pages to see if that’s the case. If it is I’ll make another post.

Another alterantive is that Google is relying more and more on human reviewers to police the content of it’s index and make adjustments. This then brings a human element to the placement of your web page in the index. Here’s a link to a couple of excerpts of the reviewers guide.

This article states (near the bottom) that G has something like 10,000 human reviewers The plot thickens…

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3. Has Google Created A Monster?

Brainboost is a ‘Question answering engine that accepts natural language queries’ and it is the spawn of Answers.com, the ultimate answer engine, with quick accurate dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia, bios, tech terms, news, sports, weather, and much more…

I’ve been using both and have been pretty impressed with the results. Of course, the content is provided by publishers that are affilited with Answers.com, so you ain’t gonna get loads of SPAM! I really like the Answers toolbar and popup. Try it and see what you think…

 maybe this will become the search engine of the future? Look out Google!

Rant over, finished no more…

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But I really do have some doubts about Google… If you know anything about the internet and search engines, you know that Google is the major player and has been for a while. However, whereas just a couple of short years ago Google was a free service, just like YouTube, Google has now morpehd into a multi, multi billion dollar advertising system with a front-end that still appears to be free search engine results.

The truth is far different from that though, as far as I can see…

Monsters Spawned

Adwords; Pay Per Click is the first child, Son Of Google. It generates billions of dollars in advertising revenue for G by allowing people to bid on keywords.

Adsense; the Ugly Sister. Allows me or you to show advertisers Adwords adds contextually on our web pages and share in the profits with G.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think these are great ideas. But both have become monsters in their own right. It seems that G is unable stop spamming and its attempts to do so invariably hurt real businesses when they get dropped from the SERPS or are forced to bid high on keywords because of low quality scores.

Google is all about relevence, at least that’s what they claim. Yet they will be the first to admit that their SERPS quality is pretty bad a lot of the time. And, of course its a SPAM issue. Well, now SPAM comes in 3 flavours. SEO, PPC and Adsense. What’s your favorite?

So Google is in a constant mode of trying to control all its spam flavors, while making billions of dollars. There’s a saying that goes something like ‘If you need to control something then its out of control’…

I wonder if we could get some sort of recompense from Google whenever spam shows up in their SERPS or Adwords or Adsense related to our keywords. You know what its like when you see your website listed amongst a load of crud and spammy pages… Well, if Viacoms lawsuit is successful that’s going to be just the tip of the iceberg. I’m sure some clever lawyer out in California will come up with a class action lawsuit.

And getting back to that lawsuit. I think its very strange that holier than though G can decide its OK for people to share copyrighted material online, but you can’t put up a web page that requires someones email address without paying, in some cases, outrageous financial penalties to G.

You can make money without doing evil… Hmmmm

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