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The search engine optimization industry has to be on its proverbial toes literally 24/7. This is because the search engines algorithms are constantly being changed and updated in order to give their searchers the best results they can.

For our part, we the SEO’s are continuing to prepare our websites so that they get in the way of existing search traffic. There always have been two opposite views of this; firstly that we are unfairly manipulating the results, and secondly that we are fairly manipulating the results.

In truth, if SEO didn’t exist to adjust websites so that they’re readable by the search engines, then the search engine results you would get a lot less organised and all over the place really. Search engine optimizers are necessary to ensure that the most qualified websites rise to the top. 9 out of 10 web designers don’t know how to make a website rank well in search engine results. They tend to miss all the key on-page criteria that SEs look for and so a well built, all-singing all-dancing expensive website will most of the time be doomed to float around among the masses of other websites that will never be found, or to sit in a pay-per-click listing for the rest of its life.

We have no-end of clients that have been sold beautiful and expensive sites and told it will solve all their problems, when in fact it doesn’t really do anything of the sort because no one can find it. We are constantly speaking to clients who wish that they hadn’t spent so much on the design of their website so that they could spend the money on optimisation.

A site that no one can find is of no use to anyone. Even in these times of uncertainty as profits are disappearing, the forward-thinking, business minded site owners will be looking to increase their market share, either by introducing new keywords to their SEO work, or starting up an SEO campaign. Shoppers are still shopping, only they’re a bit more wary of spending in these times and their numbers are fewer, but what websites owners and business directors alike should all be asking themselves the same question ” will you think forward, will you be proactive and succeed in taking a decent share of the market, or will you join the failure statistics of this recession?

As more traditional forms of trade begin to suffer, online sales increased during the Christmas 2008 period by over 25% on 2007. Some companies are making money by embracing new technologies and moving with the times, others are going to fail if they don’t evolve successfully to meet the needs of the 21st century consumer.

Unfortunate though it is, but the Internet will destroy the high streets and eventually the majority of physical retail locations. Bricks and clicks companies are increasingly seeing their shops treated as a dressing room in preparation for an online buy later on. In a way, we the people are almost shooting ourselves in the foot because when the shops go, online shopping will be the only method left, which is nowhere near the same experience.

SEO will be driven by retailers needing to save money and increase footfall to both their bricks and clicks shops. It will be an interesting year in which I think we will see some more household names join, Woolworths, MFI, etc on the scrapheap. The big question is……. will you do enough to protect your market share in 2009?

In essence, online reputation management is the process of ensuring that any bad news that get published about you is buried under hefty piles of good news so that it doesn’t get found.

It started out as a way for celebrities to maintain their “good-as-gold” reputation, but is recently becoming more and more common for every day people.

“Googling” potential business partners or associates is not uncommon to the point where someone could easily be tarnishing your reputation in the business world without you even knowing.

In these technically minded times, the Internet is always bubbling with information and the sudden popularity of things like facebook and my space means it’s simpler for a ticked off customer, journalist, even lover to damage your reputation should they so wish.

This is where you will need the services of a leading search engine optimization company, like us. We can simply remove some of this unwanted material in some cases, but this is a very difficult process. What we then do is fire large quantities of positive information in blogs, content, websites etc. at your name and push it above the negative stuff in the rankings so that it gets buried deeper than anyone will look when researching you.

What this effectively achieves is that as the SEO magic is worked on the positive content and it moves up the search engine rankings, it will push the unwanted material down to where far fewer people are ever likely to find it.

If you “Google” Kate Moss you will find that the first page is filled only with positive information, despite her recent capers which have been all over the news. From this we can surmise that she has employed this technique to try and maintain her online reputation, and she is still arguably the world’s most popular model.

Bad news travels much further and faster than good news, everyone knows that, and Google is no different, so it is essential to have good information about yourself out there, ready for if this ever happens to you, or as a precautionary measure.