The end of the world (of SEO) is coming! Or at least, that’s what some recent articles might tell you. Just a couple of erroneous statements I’ve read over the last few days:

“Social media (Twitter/Facebook etc) will soon be *the only* viable marketing medium”
There’s been loads of social mediums before Facebook and Twitter, and they’ve had their time and moved on. The net is an ever evolving, morphing, living thing, and just like everything living, it needs it’s heart and circulation. If you start following pages and links, all roads lead back to (you guessed it) Google (and other associated SE’s).

And one of the more confusing comments I’ve read to date;

“Google will stop using backlinks in the very near future”
Google’s (and other SE’s) index is built, in part, by the the way the web is interconnected; ie: backlinks. For them to stop using that method to crawl the web, and determine some level of relevance, they would have to “re-invent the wheel”. Seeing as that hasn’t happened yet, I won’t be holding my breath for this to happen either.

Search engine optimization and marketing strategies are an ever changing, and growing field. Full of pitfalls, short cuts, good ideas and bad. But it’s not going away, it will merely begin to fly instead of run; adapt and survive.

The primary aim of getting your business online is to increase its visibility. A web presence helps in getting your business a global success but only if you make your website visible out of countless number of them flowing on the internet. Various processes and tactics are practiced by the website owners for getting more notability. SEM and SEO are the key components through which online success can be ensured and there are couples of steps and process attached with SEO. Geotagging is one such method of the SEM that can help immensely in increasing the popularity of your website in local result.

Geotagging is a process under which the specific geo-coordinates are linked with the web pages or other relevant content on the website. This has become a popular process especially with the onset of rise in the photo sharing websites. It is a process that enables the webmaster to insert the geographic coordinates in the web pages, images, or such similar media. This tool is helpful as it enables you to pinpoint the location of your business exactly on the maps.

Geotags are supported by google, yahoo and other search engines for delivering local content with microformats. The visibility of the coordinates on the page can augment the convenience to the people looking for the same services and they can easily copy it directly into their GPS devices.

Hence, geotagging is a useful method in optimizing the website and must be used for gaining success in the online world

Struggling internet company AOL is pleading for patience from investors, insisting that online advertising revenues will pick up in the next two years.

Time Warner laboured over the decision to untangle themselves from the lead weight of AOL, but finally decided to jettison the company in February. Nine years ago, the two companies made the “deal of the century” with a merger that saw AOL takeover Time Warner for $160 billion.

It didn’t take long for the deal to go sour. The “transformed landscape” of digital media quickly turned into a quagmire, with AOL failing to move with the changing trends, crucially missing out on the broadband explosion and early movers who made the most out of the emerging internet advertising movement.

As subscribers dropped by two thirds, AOL shrivelled into virtual insignificance. The company changed its business model to focus on digital marketing but by then they had lost the edge of being on the frontier, and were playing catch up with the likes of Google and Yahoo. In the last three quarters, AOL’s revenue took a 20 per cent nose dive, hastening Time Warner’s decision to ditch its partner.

AOL’s chief executive Tim Armstrong told investors that AOL will make a comeback in the advertising market as the industry bounces back from the recession. “Advertisers are going to be driving to Internet Road and AOL is a major property on Internet Road,” Mr Armstrong told Reuters. The new look AOL will be pure display advertising, but with the frontier moving again to SEO, AOL could once again be caught one step behind its competitors.

Digital media analysts Outsell Inc. have projected in their annual advertising study for 2009 that some $65 billion (£39 billion) is due to be skimmed off the top of traditional advertising budgets and reallocated online.

Major brands are going through some hefty corporate liposuction, sucking the fat media budgets out of TV and newspaper and plumping up online spending. The trend towards digital has been talked about for quite some time, but according to Outsell, the money will not be transferred directly to an online advertising equivalent of the traditional ads.

Instead of investing in internet advertising, companies are increasingly looking to spend money improving their own websites, with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), web analytics and good quality relevant content.

Chief executive at Outsell, Anthea Stratigos spoke in an interview with Forbes: “The marketing dollars companies now spend on their own sites is equivalent to all TV ad revenue for the year. Eight years ago we said that the Global 2000 would be the dot-coms of tomorrow. That’s what is playing out.”

If SEO copywriting isn’t about the percentage of keywords within the copy, then what is it about? Balance. You have two audiences with SEO copywriting: the search engines and your site visitors. But surprisingly, the balance doesn’t come with serving both masters well. The balance comes in how much you cater to the engines. You see, your site visitors always come first.

However, if you write with too little focus on the engines, you won’t see good rankings. If you put too much focus on the engines, you’ll start to lose your target audience. Balance… always balance.

Recession is a time for battening down the hatches, staying the course and avoiding unnecessary expenses — right?

Not according to Canada’s entrepreneurs, who are in a fighting mood as they await a recovery. In a new survey, 61% of business owners said they are investing in innovation and/or research and development this year, which may surprise business-watchers who think small business owners are innovation laggards.

But business owners are always looking at new product ideas and tweaking their service offerings. Designing a new type of sandal, hiring an SEO consultant to beef up a Web site, or recruiting a student to make cold calls all count as innovation in a small company, where you fall behind whenever you stop moving forward.

The Canadian Small Business Monitor, published last week by American Express, breaks ground by putting a price tag on innovation investment. An impressive 13% of the 500 business owners surveyed said they will spend more than 10% of revenues on innovation or research and development this year; 10% expect to spend between 6% and 10%; and 28% plant to invest 1% to 5%.

Another reassuring finding is only 19% of business owners said they will spend nothing on it “because innovation/ R&D does not apply to my business;” while 13% said they don’t have the budget for it, and 7% were undecided.

(That last group probably includes the dry cleaner that tore your favourite jacket, the e-commerce Web site that lost your order and the ad agency that produced the Stephane Dion video last December.)

Overall, 40% of the businesses surveyed consider innovation a “high priority,” while 8% call it a “top priority.” Generally, the larger the company, the higher priority they place on innovation.

Like anywhere else, a website requires optimization in order to rank within its own city, and Winnipeg is no exception. Winnipeg is the 7th largest city in Canada and the largest city between Toronto and Calgary.

Home to several internet startups in health, travel, and finance, Winnipeg is an overlooked technical hub with lots to offer. A little known fact, its where a few internet industries were started. Winnipeg also has a small gaming and film community which is thriving as well.

Internet marketing has made location a non-issue, allowing people virtually anywhere to operate a business online.

What is SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Borrowing a definition from wikipedia… “it is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results.” SEO is a process which requires a time investment in order to see results. For faster results, one might try PPC, which you can setup and turn on in the same day.

Search Engine Optimization Winnipeg
There’s a city that lies on the prairies where two rivers meet. Known as Winnipeg, it’s known for hot summers, cold winters, love for hockey, and the great outdoors.

Winnipeg is also a thriving community for business, both online and offline, and has contributed a great deal for a city of barely 700,000. There is a strong community for web developers, designers, and Internet marketers. There is also the Winnipeg SEO and SEM groups as well

In the taxi on the way to the airport yesterday, the driver made the sort of offhand, clichéd remark that nobody ever takes seriously: “What would we do without computers?” Always one to take things seriously, though, I jumped at the bait. What would I do without computers?

Everything about my life would be different. Obviously, I couldn’t do the work that I do — and that’s probably true for you too, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this column. I would also need a replacement for my social media addictions.

Everything about my life would be different — and that’s true for most people. If we didn’t have cell phones, our lives would be dramatically different. If we didn’t have television, our lives would be dramatically different.

But now imagine that we didn’t have Google. Imagine a Terminator came back from the future to kill Google before it became self-aware. Imagine that it found the global jeadquarters in Mountain View and managed to destroy Google’s “brain.” (Don’t you love that no matter how distributed and redundant our actual technology gets, every artificially intelligent movie bad guy always has a single “brain” that can be destroyed in a shower of sparks and dramatic effects?) Or maybe the Terminator just unplugs it. Whatever. Bottom line, we wake up tomorrow and there’s no Google.

For purposes of this thought experiment, let’s actually restrict ourselves for a moment to the idea of a world without Google search. Relax — we’ve still got YouTube.

Here’s what I believe would happen from a consumer perspective: there would be a brief and reasonably harsh shudder — and then we would go on as normal. The hundreds of Lilliputian search engines nipping at Google’s heels would rush in to fill the vacuum. Searches from your address bar? No problem. SERPs with images? No problem. Mobile search? No problem.

The commercial ecosystem, of course, would be dramatically undermined. All of the entities that have built their businesses on the idea of an ever-dominant Google would have to quickly and accurately reallocate spending to the most dominant of the new pretenders. Publishers would have to switch networks. Sites using Google custom search would have to offer another way to navigate.

But here is where it gets interesting for me: the strategy wouldn’t really change.

A company investing in text ads would still invest in text ads, because text ads will still be an effective, measurable way to advertise. A publisher tapped into the Google network would tap into a different network — but it would still tap into a network. Keyword identification and SEO would go on as normal, just with different players.

As integrated as Google has become in our lives, its functions are still replaceable. That “competition’s only one click away” idea is actually true, in theory. We stick with Google because we love it, not because we can’t get satisfaction anywhere else.

The best relationships are always those that exist out of continually renewed choice. Google has a lot of “habit capital” it would have to burn through before people started questioning that choice, but at the end of the day, it’s not really that hard to find another way to search.

If there were no Google? We’d simply have a different logo at the top of the page.

A flurry of new information released as part of Forrester research predicts a huge change of emphasis from traditional media to online advertising over the next few years. In particular, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) are due to double over the next five years according to the Forrester report.

In the US, digital marketing will become $55 billion industry by 2014, representing 21 per cent of the overall marketing spend. In the UK, online advertising spend already controls over a fifth of the overall advertising market, but the trend predicted by Forrester is that online will continue to flourish while other aspects perish.

The most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline. Yep. With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.”

The message is getting through that online marketing can achieve the same as traditional media for less. A paradigm shift is occurring, with 60 per cent of advertising gurus ploughing money into digital media rather than the normal advertising avenues. Up to 59 per cent of the increase in advertising spend will be allocated to SEO and PPC.

PPC is currently much more prominent than SEO with most companies preferring to invest in paid search. However, as organic search starts gaining more widespread traction, more brands will turn to search engine optimization to drive traffic naturally to their websites. By 2014 the US will spend over $5 billion on SEO according to the Forrester research.

If you’re a website owner, then you probably already know that websites need plenty of love and attention. Then you have to think about how you use your website to get the best return on investment. Most companies pass the request on to the marketing team in the hope that they can work wonders in implementing a successful marketing strategy. This isn’t always the case, as normal marketing employees haven’t got the faintest idea on where to start to help market a website for the internet.

There is a phrase for one of the best parts of internet marketing, this is search engine optimisation(SEO). This is when a company makes changes to your website and a range of other strategies to help your website appear as high as possible in the listings in major search engines such as Google. Because search engines are still relitavely new in the world of business it can be difficult to find resources to help you, or even people to find who are willing to help. I can imagine there are not many people out there who even knew what SEO was let alone think that they needed it.

There are 100’s of people out there that claim to be someone who can help. Don’t be fooled by techincal talk from these guys as they don’t generally have the results to back up their claims. If you decide you need to look at marketing for your website then make sure the company you choose, are not scared to show previous customers or results. Always make sure you recieve testimonials from these customers to otherwise you could be sending an awful lot of money down the well and not getting much in return.