MyHome in Difficulty

Major online Australian property portal MyHome is about to shut down its website after burning cash for past 15 months. MyHome.com.au owners are Microsoft and PBL which shows that having money is just not enough to succeed or should I say to survive in business. They have spent around 20 millions dollars in an attempt to capture a share of the $140 million online property advertising market. However MyHome found that it could not attract nearly enough online property searchers to at least break even. Unique visitors have reached half a million per month, while Domain.com.au has two million and Realestate.com.au more than four million unique browsers. The costs were too high and hence the decision to pull the plug. From SEO perspective the website has been only at around # 18 on Google while searching for "property for sale". Failure to get to top 5 listings as well as usabilty issues had a negative impact on the whole business model.

Search Events in 2008

If you are looking to learn more about SEO I have a list of upcoming SEO events and search marketing conferences. This year Search Engine Strategies will be held on March 17-20, 2008 in New York City. WebmasterWorld's PubCon will be in Las Vegas Nevada in later months of 2008. Ad Tech online marketing conference is now hosting in 10 cities around the world with the first in Sydney on March 12, 2008. SXSW Interactive Festival will take place from March 7 to March 11 in Austin, Texas. Those are the most important shows, but please leave a comment if there are any other SEO events which could be included on this short list.

Christmas SEO

Things seems to be winding down before holidays so I thought I will do some Googling for Christmas and SEO. It is a very far fetched and unrelated search but few interesting results could be worthwhile to mention. First there is a Christian Web Masters Forum which expresses concern that "Christians should try and get a good explanation of the nativity and what Christianity is all about as the top search result for "Christmas" at Google." Yes I can see that, since Google shows as first result Wikipedia entry for Christmas and just below we can find North Pole Santa Claus website as a second result. But I think it will be hard to dismiss Santa Claus which has become very strong tradition. The other news is that we will be able to track Santa in Google Earth on Christmas Eve in real time.

Harmful Web Content

In order to combat browser malware installations and make Internet safer, Google is displaying a brief message in the search results next to offending website as follows: This site may harm your computer. You may succeed to get your website to top 10 results but if you get this kind of message next to it, you would want to quickly redesign the website in order to avoid further negative publicity. However not everyone is getting the message. This morning when I run a search for "seo consulting" the current # 4 result showed as follows:
SEO Consultant - Shimon Sandler Blog SEO Consultant ...
This site may harm your computer.
The SEO Consultant must start with understanding the clients’ business and marketing goals to develop the strategy and approach for a winning SEO campaign. ...
www.shimonsandler.com/?p=200 - Similar pages
The question is that - if Google is a search engine, should it have a role to pass judgement on the websites?

Kitchens and SEO

Article "How to scale Mt. Google" in Business 2.0 magazine described a story on kitchen cabinetry online store - Kitchen Cabinet Mart based in Northern California. From humble beginnings when a website ranked low on Google, the owner Giovanna Villanueva has managed to get to number one listing. By methodical application of many SEO techniques when searching for "kitchen cabinets" (very popular phrase in this category) her website pops up at the top of Google's very important first page, even ahead of one of the country's largest cabinetmakers, Merillat Industries. The small business website KitchenCabinetMart.com went up from few orders to $10,000 in sales per month and Villanueva says that she can hardly keep up with all the inquiries and orders.

Politics and Search Engines

Looking at important title tags of two major political parities in Australia it seems that Labour Party has updated their meta tags recently trying to present a subtle political message for anyone using search engines. Liberal Party has done nothing so far and we are presented with very boring and unappealing message. Liberals are not getting good advice on optimising their website for search engines, but at the same time they prefer to spend hundreds of millions of dollars mostly for TV ads. According to Labour Party website, by election day later this year, John Howard will spent at least $850 million on taxpayer funded government advertising.
The Liberal Party of Australia
Official site of the Liberal Party of Australia. Features news, events, current topics, contact information and links ... www.liberal.org.au
Australian Labor Party
HOWARD'S ADVERTISING BLITZ. John Howard is wasting taxpayers' money at record speed. By election day later this year, he will have spent at least $850 ... www.alp.org.au

SEO Consolidation

Recent article in Media section of The Australian has revealed that one of the top SEO companies in Australia - Found Agency is due to complete the sale of its business to specialist marketing services Photon Group Limited for estimated $3 million. Siimon Reynolds is one of the executive directors in Photon Group Limited so it is a definite sign that SEO is taken more seriously and becomes a major strategy for big marketing agencies. It is the second acquisition of SEO business in last few months. In December 2006 Chris Dimmock has sold his search engine marketing company - Cogentis to BlueFreeway Limited. SEO companies consolidation is a new trend in Australia but it should not come as a surprise since in United States, big Madison Avenue marketing agencies have been buying SEO companies for last few years. For more details see the article:
Link kings net rich pickings in The Australian.