If you’re unsure as to what Search Engine Marketing (also known as Pay-Per-Click advertising and Sponsored Search) entails, there are two excellent breakdowns in brief here, or in detail here.

SEO is a blanket term that’s used to describe the process of enhancing your website, its content and its meta-data (that is, the information contained in each webpage that humans don’t usually see, but which machines – which includes Google’s search – interpret).

Undertaking SEO can be a project that varies greatly both in time & cost, and in overall effect to your business’s bottom line – the latter of which is determined by several factors. Generally, when you deal with a quality SEO agent you’ll enjoy the benefits of sitting closer to the top of results page for a handful of searches related to your business.

With any SEO service your website is modified (and sometimes re-engineered) to target a handful of specific keywords. Over time, your SEO agent will alter your website to feature the keywords (or clauses) that you’ve chosen to be ‘ranked’ for (that is, to increase the rank of one’s website in search engine results pages so that it appears closer to the revered #1 spot on Google).

SEO is a process that takes time, and one which relies on Google revisiting your website to glean new information from it – which can happen as often as every day (for very popular sites) to every few weeks (for the rest of us). Every time your website is modified to better target your keywords, along with it comes an inevitable wait for Google to revisit your website. As website rankings are constantly changing, maintaining your ranking for a specific keyword is an ongoing task that requires a fair amount of maintenance.

So for example, if you’re a plumber in Chatswood, it would make sense to choose SEO keywords such as chatswood plumber, or north shore plumbing (Chatswood being a suburb in Sydney’s north shore). These would be an example of some common keywords a customer might use to find a local plumber on Google.

Whilst being near the top of organic results for “chatswood plumbing” or “north shore plumbing” would be great for a plumber servicing Chatswood, relying on these two (and a few more) keywords alone will inevitably lead to a loss of many potential customers.

The trouble is that many more customers will search for terms such as emergency plumbing artarmon or 24 hour plumbing lindfield [where Artarmon and Lindfield are both surrounding suburbs of Chatswood]. And that’s where Search Engine Optimisation begins to fall short. With Pay-Per-Click, not only can you have your ad shown above your competitors’ organic listings, but you can also customise each message according to your audience. Examples below:

plumbing chatswood	emergency plumbing artarmon	24 hour plumbing lindfield
For our Chatswood customers (a bustling commercial and business area with many high-rise apartments) we can emphasise your speed of service.	For Artarmon customers (a mix of commercial, industrial and suburban), we can tailor your advertising to reflect cost-effectiveness.	For Lindfield customers (consisting of mostly privately-owned homes) we can emphasise personal service and guarantee for homeowners looking for a quality plumber.

 Seeing as the cost and scale of an SEO project goes up with each keyword targeted it can begin to look a little daunting for first time businesses looking to introduce SEO to their website. Just don’t expect this same sort of reach or the immediacy of pay-per-click!

Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing are great for their inherent versatility. Google pay-per-click ads can be modified quickly to adapt to any changes in the market, and they can apply to more than a few keywords at once, each with individualised messages to suit your target audience.

With respect to SEO, we believe that a holistic approach to marketing your business online involves both components of search engine optimisation and pay-per-click advertising. After all, our aim is to get your customers onto your website and dialling your phone – and both technologies offer a different way of doing that. Search Engine Marketing happens to have the advantage of being more agile, more accountable, and with a faster, more pronounced return on your investment.

Social media sites are set to overtake traffic from search engines.

Search Engines (such as Google and Yahoo) attributing 12.8% of all sites visited, social media sites (such as Facebook and MySpace) closely follow with 11.8%. It is estimated that social media will soon overtake search engines as the most popular websites to visit – especially so over the Christmas break.

Facebook and MySpace must be licking their lips at the prospect of being the most visited sites in Australia and therefore an increased potential advertising revenue. Much like the television stations of traditional media, more people watching equals a larger audience for advertisers and therefore more advertising potential in terms of raw numbers and targeted demographic reach.

Another interesting fact to note is that Australians uses search engines more (12.8%) than the Brits (UK-12.6%), the kiwis (New Zealand 12.2%) and the yanks (U.S.-10%).

Google Dominates Search Engines-Bing the mover

• Google- 87.1% ( – )
• Bing- 4.7% ( + 0.6%)
• Yahoo- 2.3% ( – )

The amount of advertising dollars spent on launching Bing and creating brand awareness has been apparently significant enough to warrant an increase in market share. However, it is not nearly as big as what the big coffers at Microsoft would have hoping for.  It is expected that Bing will increase their market share slightly over the Christmas period and into the new year.

Users Love Brands

One of the largest changes in users’ search behaviors is the rapid increase in brand name and brand related searches. In 2006, brand related searches accounted for 8.75% and in 2009 it accounts for 14.22% of all searches. This is an important development for search marketers as it shows the benefit of using brand related keywords more so now than ever before.

Searchers More Refined Than Ever Before

Whether it has to do with demographics shifting, or users becoming better practiced in the art of searching, users are using more words to search than ever before. 1-2 word searches have decreased and 3-5 word searches have increased from their 2008 figures. When 3-5 Word Searches now account for 52.8% of all queries and it is becoming increasingly important that long tail keywords are a part of any AdWords campaign.

• 1 Word Searches- 18.6% (Decreased)
• 2 Word Searches- 28.6% (Decreased)
• 3 Word Searches- 24.2% (Increased)
• 4 Word Searches- 14.3 % (Increased)
• 5 Word Searches- 14.3% (Increased)

The mobile advertising pioneer is a Silicon Valley success story that emerged in 2006, when Omar Hamoui founded the company after being frustrated by a lack of ways to generate traffic for his mobile site, claiming it was too hard to engage users.

“I’ve been working in mobile for over seven years now. Before AdMob, I founded two separate mobile startups that never got significant traction. It was so frustrating to build what I knew was an incredible service only to find myself unable to distribute or monetize the product without a carrier or handset deal. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one. Talk to any veteran in mobile and they will tell you just how hard it was to get things done only a few years ago,” wrote Hamoui in a statement.

These days AdMob is serving targeted and personalized advertisements on the mobile web through the use of its mobile advertising platform. According to the company website, the network claims to have served over 125 billion impressions.

The acquisition is the fourth biggest publically-disclosed deal in Google’s history, at least if Wikipedia’s metrics can be trusted. Upstaging the AdMob deal in price tag is the landmark $3.3 billion (US $3.1 billion) the company paid for DoubleClick, plus the $1.8 billion (US $1.65 billion) shelled out for YouTube and the cool $1.08 billion (US $1 billion) paid for a 5% stake in America Online – more commonly known as AOL – back in 2005.

Word also leaked that Google is rumoured to be acquiring Gizmo5, which was swallowed up in the hype surrounding the AdMob deal. The search giant is allegedly writing a cheque for US $30 million for the VoIP startup, though no official confirmation has come through yet.

Car manufacturers were the first to get in on the action, with Mitsubishi and Holden both shelling out coin to have their own videos promoted on generic search results. A scan for the term “4×4” or “car” in YouTube will put a sponsored link to Mitsubishi’s video channel next to the normal list of search results. If you try this at home, don’t be tempted to click on the “Is your tongue kissable?” clip that also shows up, as it’s a highly unwatchable skit for an electric toothbrush.

 YouTube’s Jay Akkad was in town to promote the launch of the service, which has been available in the US for more than a year. According to Akkad, the pricing of the service is done on a cost-per-click basis and is showing strong click-through results.

It isn’t all milk and honey with Google’s marquee clients on the project, as Simon Dunwoody, search director at Mediaedge:cia – the company that developed Mitsubishi’s YouTube campaign – told ITWire that he was in discussions with the search giant as to why the click-per-view cost had proved higher than the 5-10 cents he had been anticipating.

Despite these teething problems, Dunwoody expects Mitsubishi to continue using the service as it has boosted the subscriber numbers for the company’s YouTube channel. The Mitsubishi-themed channel has received 6,059 views since its launch on the 20^th of April this year and currently has 23 subscribers.

YouTube has also admitted that there is nothing stopping derogatory videos appearing in the organic search results next to promoted links. A spokesperson from the company told The Sydney Morning Herald that advertisers can combat this by adding negative terms to their campaign, to prevent the sponsored videos showing up next to certain results.