Search engine optimization, I do not need to remind you what this is, right?  Well, for those of you who need a refresher course, here we go, according to Webopedia, an online encyclopedia dedicated to computer technology, SEO is “the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a website by ranking high in the search results of a search engine.  The higher a website ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that site will be visited by a user.”  Now, that we have gotten this out of the way; let us discuss recent news in the world of SEO.  According to small business trends, “All companies are recognizing the need for and value of having dedicated staff to recommend and implement SEO strategies.”  Simply put, SEO is no longer relegated to the tech-savvy; more companies are educating in-house employees on the importance of SEO.

Small Business Trends also tells us personalized search results are basically turning ranking reports into useless tidbits of information, “In other words, it’s no longer about whether your business is ranking for a certain search term at, say #2 in Google.  Traffic and conversions are what you should be tracking, not what number you rank at for a specified term.”

As I continued my search for the latest information on SEO, I could not ignore the obvious – YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and similar sites.  If you do not believe in the importance of making your presence known on these social sites, read the following.  According to Search Insider, “this fall, comScore and Ad Age reported that YouTube surpassed Yahoo as the second-largest search engine; within days, YouTube announced its new search advertising platform.  What is more, MySpace (563 million U.S. queries in October 2008, according to comScore) is a bigger search engine than AOL (424 million) and Ask.com (362 million).  Queries on eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon combined (980 million) nearly rival MSN.com (1.04 billion).”  Having read this, I can only surmise these websites are an important part of any strategic SEO marketing initiative.

According to WebPro News,”In the organic listings field, there are four major search engines and about six minor ones.  Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves are considered the Big 4, as they each have their own unique spiders and ranking algorithms.  Following the Big 4 are, AOL, Lycos, Netscape, AltaVista, FAST, and Excite.”  What does this tell us, if you want to get your business noticed, you better cover your basics, in other words, these search engines.   For those of you who are truly interested in finding out which search engines have the highest amount of search engine affiliations, this may be helpful to you, Search Engine Relationship Chart (SERC) – http://www.ihelpyou.com/search-engine-chart.html

Although navigating this chart can be slightly confusing, it is certainly worth the effort.

* Did You Know – you are ONE of 1,463,632,361 internet users in the world?

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