Just a heads up…

the Wall St. Journal is reporting that Google will be issuing an IPO in a few days. We have heard this rumour several times before so… This may be happening, this may not be happening. In December the WSJ also reported an IPO was coming very soon. It was delayed by a sudden downturn in the market then and uncertainty around Yahoo and MSN. Perhaps conditions are right today. The biggest evidence that Google might issue is the April 30 deadline for filing corporate information with the US Government. As Google has more than 1,000 employees, they must file corporate and financial information for the first time in company history.

Stay tuned to this one folks, it will change the search engine environment in ways we can’t predict.

Just a quickie here folks:

Along with several other SEO’s who have called us over the past two days, we have noticed a huge number of changes in Google’s listings, back-links and assigned pagerank values over the past 72-hours. These changes appear to be increasing. We believe that what we see today will be radically different next week. Just to let you know.

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Often there is some confusion between these two crucial roles and what they function to provide. The biggest confusion being that to perform one well will, by default, secure the other. This is not the case.

The role of marketing is to attract as much attention as possible to a product or service. The role of sales is to take the people who have noticed what you have to offer and turn them into clients. Definitely complimentary roles if done correctly, however, often people focus too strongly on one to the detriment of the other. Read more…

As the competition for search engine placement becomes increasingly competitive more and more small website owners are turning towards Pay Per Click advertising to draw the much needed traffic.

But as this new means of advertising also becomes more popular, keyword click-through rates are rising. This medium, once inexpensive, can be a very costly means of generating traffic. Read more…

There have been a great deal of news since last week’s issue on the advent of Google’s controversial Gmail system created to compete with Yahoo! Mail and MSN’s Hotmail. The news can be summarized quickly; upheaval.

Here are some examples of what has occurred since our last newsletter (April 7):
Read more…

Search engines work on word and character association. That’s a fairly obvious simplification of how an extremely complex algorithm can detect a topic or theme from a 2 – 5 word search string and deliver a list of websites having something to do with that subject. Words are powerful in any language but English is the unofficial universal language of the web and English is a very imprecise language. Read more…

Many of you will have received notice from AltaVistas InfoSpider program stating that Yahoo will no longer be accepting paid-inclusion results from Inktomi. This statement is half-correct in that as of today, April 16, 2004, Yahoo is switching to its own database which has been developed from the Inktomi database. Yahoo recently unveiled a new paid-inclusion program that has a pay-per-click component along with an annual $49(US) review fee. This new pricing policy came into effect at midnight, April 15/16, 2004. Read more…