New Battle Brewing in Search Engine Optimization?

Great post by Jim Hedger at Search Engine News Journal on the possibility of a new battle in the search engine optimization wars. Apparently, Jim feels that the PhD's at Google are fed up with what they see as the "gaming" of their search engine results by SEO firms. Jim speculates that Google may be rebuilding their ENTIRE 4.5 BILLION index of webpages, using a new spider to categorize (and characterize) the pages. If so, this will surely be more disruptive to many website operators than even the infamous "Florida" update that wreaked havoc on many web businesses. After Florida, many sites found that they had basically disappeared from Google search results and as a result they had zero traffic, customers and sales.

While we think SEO is an important overall part of running a successful ecommerce business, it is an "us against them" game (us being Search Engines and them being SEO firms). This adversarial relationship will often leave the SEO customer in the middle. The website owner finds herself with fluctuating numbers of visitors, customers and sales. Hard to run a business that way.

We came to the conclusion in operating our own online businesses that the only way to have a dependable revenue stream was to increasingly rely on paid search advertising, where we could control our exposure, budget and flow of customers. Our experience in managing our PPC campaigns and optimizing our ads to increase response and decrease average costs per click led us to our new product, which we will be launching shortly.

Paid search is an important part of any websites search engine marketing campaign, and as the battles over natural search listings continue, will become even more crucial.