SEO Is Dead? How? It Hasn’t Even Been Born Yet! More Crazy Shots From Algo-holics

The argument that SEO is Dead is preposterous! New stats from SEMPO show that not only has SEO not even hit yet, but the SEO fetus is still growing. According to SEMPO, the North American SEM industry grew from $9.4 billion in 2006 to $12.2 billion in 2007, exceeding earlier projections of $11.5 billion for 2007 and SEO only accounts for a mere 10.5% as part of the pie. How can something be dead that hasn’t even been born yet?

In fact, my prediction is that SEO and Organic traffic awareness is likely to increase as most small to mid-size business owners can’t afford spending thousands per day on PPC as their larger competitors do. PPC definitely has its advantages, but how should we as Search Professionals expect an emerging competitor of Dell for instance to outspend and compete with the mega giant that is spending more than $200k day on PPC. The best alternative to the PPC craze is definitely SEO and new and up and coming businesses should take advantage in an industry that is growing at a record pace.

Need another reason as if trying to outspend the big boys doesn’t sound intimidating enough? Organic traffic converts better than its PPC counterpart. The majority of retailers, almost 1/2, maintain that natural search delivers better sales conversions than PPC. Organic needs to be put in the spotlight a little but more, however with the major SE’s getting $0 from Organic and Billions from PPC, this is still not realistically going to happen in the near future unless Google and Yahoo buy their own SEO company like Microsoft has.

When Will The U.S. Online Ad Spend Overtake TV?

Another free shot from the algorithm addicts (algo-holics) at Direct Hit Solutions.

It appears as though the UK has figured out that spending $$$ on Search Engine Marketing and Online Ad Spending is the one way to guarantee growth. According to Reuters, Online Ad Spending in the UK will overtake television as the top advertising medium in the UK this year.

And I thought the US was the country to follow. It appears even though the US has hit a recession, Online Ad Spending here is likely to increase and remain the hottest trend of advertising on the mainland with Search Engine Marketing remaining the hottest trend in Online Spending.

So to answer the question, I believe it’s only a matter of time and a short period of time before US advertisers shift the majority of their yearly ad spend Online and realize that the days of spending on a declining Television industry are coming to an end.

The algo-holics at Direct Hit Solutions will keep you up to date on this topic. Check back frequently.

Be Careful – Alogorithms May Be Shifting – Another Free Shot From Direct Hit Solutions

The SEO team at Direct Hit Solutions has recently (meaning in the past couple of months) noticed ranking changes on yes everybody’s favorite Search Engines: Google & Yahoo. So what is going on with these SE’s?

We remember a little over a year ago we received floods of calls after a huge shift in Yahoo was made leaving many website owners scratching their heads and wondering what the deal with Yahoo was. Well, we’d like to officially announce Yahoo is at it again and they are finally looking like a real Google competitor. The recent changes that Yahoo is making are finally making SERP’s look reasonable again. For a long time we was wondering if Yahoo would ever figure out what they were doing wrong, and it looks like the buyout offer from Microsoft made them get back on track. It appears that they’ve gone back to the basics and started ranking based on the way it should be i.e. content, site structure, keyword density, etc. We’d like to buy a shot for Yahoo and say “Welcome Back”. We missed you!

And we didn’t forget about the Googlebots either. It must be hard to be perfect. We can’t imagine being in any business and owning nearly 70% of the marketshare. Fresh content and videos have now climbed their way to the top of Google’s SERP’s and are now a force to be reckoned with. So what can you do about this? Simple.

Step 1. Create a blog and update it often. Make sure the blog posts are written with loads of content and keywords that are generating current and future interest.

Step 2. Create correctly coded videos and place them on YouTube. Not only can these videos get ranked highly on the SERP’s, but they can also generate a steady flow of traffic from the streaming video giant.

Lastly, this final shot we’re buying is for Google. Cheers to Google for making searching a more pleasurable experience for the searcher. We were all getting sick of looking at outdated info on the web and videos make searching tons more fun.