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.

Google Earth Search

Google Earth, the site launched in June this year, offers maps and satellite images for regional searches. Although not all areas are highly detailed, some images are very high resolution, and some show sensitive military or government locations.
Countries like India and China expressed concerns about danger of this knowledge to be used in possible attacks against those locations. Debbie Frost, spokewoman for Google, noted that the software uses information already available from public sources however Google welcomes dialogue with governments, and we will be happy to talk to authorities about any concerns they may have.
In Australia there is strong opposition from Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation ANSTO for making the Sydney Lucas Heights nuclear reactor images freely available. And ANSTO demands for the Google Earth images to be completely obscured or at least the quality of imagery downgraded.

Search Engine Rankings

According to recent search engine rankings conducted by ComScore Networks Google accounted for 37.3% of searches (up 1.2% from July 2005 search engine rankings), Yahoo! had 29.7% of the search engine traffic, followed by MSN 15.8% , AOL Search 9.6% and Ask Jeeves 6%. Google is also recognized as the best news search engine, most SEO and webmaster friendly search provider and best search ads provider.

Spam Blog Crusade

There is a spam blog crusade going out there. And some people are attempting to explore this trend from a commercial perspective creating spam blog directories and generating lots of traffic to their sites where they usually have AdSense or other type of advertising. Just recently I have seen on Technorati big adds about making money from the blog by placing text links. So what is a spam blog? I guess it is all about where do we draw the line? It would be similar as a question: at which point a man who starts to lose hair becomes a bald man? Sorites paradox again.
For me one of the examples of spam blogging is what bloggers are doing with the keyword "failure". It is an old story I admit, but it will not go away. So, are we going to call all the tens of thousands of bloggers link spammers? I am not here to judge that. And I think that the First Amendment does guarantee freedom of speech and the freedom of links we can have on our blogs. And for those who don't like the results, they most likely missed out on this special sort of voting.

Interview with SEO Consultant

I share belief with Terrence Gordon from Performance SEO that Search Engine Optimization will become more of a controlled environment and less of a "wild west" as more companies realize its value and start investing larger sums of money. In his recent interview he has been discussing the value of a page rank, integrating Flash into SEO projects, Google sandbox, SEO competitions and return on investment that companies are receiving from Top Rankings in the search engine results. To view the entire interview see Google Blogoscoped.

Relevance in Search Results

The ongoing pursuit by Google for greater relevance in search engine results has been shown in Patent filing #20050071741 - Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data. From now on Google algorithm will analyze the history of your web pages and the history of links to your website. All the information gathered will be used to determine relevance. If you want to prevent your website from disappearing in search results you need to create new content on existing pages and keep adding new web pages.