SEO Contest for Charity

The SEO contest has been announced by the webmaster community forum Webmaster-talk.com. The keyword phrase for the contest is: "retsambew dash klat for Charity" which means "webmaster dash talk" spelled backwords. The end date is Friday 01 September 2006. To win the website will need to rank the highest for a brand new domain and a keyword phrase "retsambew dash klat for Charity" in Google. The total cash value of the prizes is $5,810.30. The contest conditions stipulate that one must use a brand new domain name and the winning page must link to a charity of your choice from Give.org.

Search Party News Article

Advanet has been mentioned in the Fairfax Business Network article which deals with SEO business in Australia. Three leading search engine marketing companies have been selected by a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald to provide the advice and opinions about the current state of the Internet marketing game.
The extensive news article covers advice on search friendly aspects of the web design and how to achieve higher placements on search engines. To add some spice to rather technical SEO subject, speed dating company has been chosen as a case study. And for those who want to stay incognito, there are also hints about how to disappear from the search engine results. I guess most of us will want to do just the opposite, so I encourage you to read Coming to the aid of the search party.

SEO and Journalism

How to give your post or an article search engine friendly title? That is the question which some journalists and bloggers are considering. The New York Times in the recent article This Boring Headline Is Written for Google is elaborating on how to attract search engine spiders and do not bore readers at the same time. It will be a difficult act to balance.
"The news media are gingerly stepping into the field of SEO. It is a booming business, estimated at $1.25 billion in revenue worldwide last year, and projected to more than double this year. SEO seems to be an endless chess game. The optimizer wizards devise some technical trick to outwit the search-engine algorithms that rank the results of a search. The search engines periodically change their algorithms to thwart such self-interested manipulation, and the game starts again."

BMW and Fast SEO

Out of control speeding BMW on one of the English motorway was not the only difficulty facing the German automaker. Google has removed the German BMW website from its index and they have learned the hard way that fast SEO strategy does not work very well. The delisting lasted for only three days, and SEO community had a chance to see that no matter how big is the company they need to follow the Google guidelines in order to achieve good search engine positions.
BMW web designers had repeated the words "gebrauchtwagen" and "neuwagen" which means "used car" and "new car" many tens of times on the home page. They used two techniques: invisible text and keyword stuffing to boost the search engine rankings. Those are some of the black hat SEO methods which sooner or later lead to demise of the website.

Online Advertising

Are you tired of online advertising? Most people would agree that everywhere we look we find so called - efficient targeted online ads, and there are just too many of them. So why if everybody is very tired of all the ads, the website which is full of them and having no other content at all, receives 25,000 unique visitors every single hour? I am referring here to Million Dollar Homepage designed by Alex Tew, a 21-year-old business student from England. If you are not quite tired of online ads you can find his website easily.

SEO Marketing Boom

Search engine optimization (SEO) and Search engine marketing (SEM) are becoming more recognized form of online advertising for ever-growing number of companies. Over 12 billion dollars will be spent this year in the United States alone. In Australia this figure is close to 90 million dollars. Many big companies like for example Procter & Gamble are cutting back on their TV ad spending, and increasing funds for Internet brand building. The main challenge for SEO companies is to ensure that the websites of their customers are appearing first in the search engine results when certain keywords for products or services are requested. However this will become increasingly difficult as more companies will enhance their websites to compete for top search results.

MSN Book Search

According to internal Microsoft research over 50 percent of online queries go unanswered on search engines. To address this issue Microsoft intention is to to launch MSN Book Search. This will greatly improve finding the exact information including the content from the books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources. The idea of a book search in not new, since Google started its own Google Book Search called Library Project many months ago. This has created already some controversy and has provoked lawsuits by publishers and writers. It will be a battle for Microsoft as well, to achive its goal in creating more relevent search results.