I read on a blog the other day that Google India (www.google.co.in) had gone from a Page Rank 8 to a Page Rank 7. I couldn’t really find any logical explanation for such a sudden drop especially coming from a Google site!

Just to refresh your memory, the Page Rank (PR) was developed by Larry Page and later Sergey Brin to be one of the main methods used by Google to determine a page’s relevance and importance. You can easily find your PR by downloading the Google Toolbar or by using one of the SEO tools in our website. (more…)

Early indications are that the spending on search engine marketing (SEM) will continue to grow in 2009. Companies are continuing to reap the benefit that a strong SEM campaign can provide to their ROI and show no signs of pulling out of this form of marketing. eMarketer.com has predicted that there will be steady growth of around 9% of online spending in the US with the figures likely to be similar in the UK and Europe in 2009. (more…)

Microsoft has beaten rivals Google to secure being the default search provider of America’s soon to be largest wireless carrier Verizon. The deal was cited as a major victory for Microsoft with both Google and Yahoo! bidding for the same service. Verizon are currently closing on a takeover of Alltel to give them 78 million subscribers in the US taking them past AT&T as the number one carrier in the US. 

Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer announced the deal in Las Vegas at the Consumer Electrics Show after a long period of speculation. The deal also allows for Microsoft to manage the search and display advertising on Verizon’s mobile internet service as well.  (more…)

Can a sitemap make your website more attractive to a search engine web crawler? That’s the theory going around after a few successful trial runs which have been carried out recently.

A popular SEO blog has recently put together a trial where they added on a sitemap to six posts and left a further six posts without a sitemap. Their research found that when they submitted a sitemap with the post it took the Google bot 14 minutes to visit it and 245 minutes for the Yahoo! bot to visit. (more…)

So 2009 is upon us so what do we think will happen within the search engine optimisation (SEO) industry in 2009? Will it follow the economic trend of the past few months or be the exception to the rule and see a rise in popularity. What other directions should we be looking towards for our clients in this coming year?

How will the fortunes of standard search engine marketing such as pay per click (PPC) stand up now that people are tightening belts? Growing trends have shown us that the way forward for a lot of our clients is to pursue higher organic search listings. This trend occurred even before the economic slowdown had begun. (more…)