Isn’t it the absolute hardest thing to pick yourself up again after a crazy 2007 of constant online marketing? Hopefully you’ve had a good break but its now 2008 and time to push forward again towards your goals whether its to create a new site, increase traffic, increase turnover or even selling your site. Just like the start of every other year, plan ahead. Its better to do things today (or even yesterday) and see the results come later. In some cases, procrastinating could cost you dearly as I’ve learned in the past. Drive your site a mile ahead with the following simple tasks for your site. Complete article on No More Procrastinating! Five Key Tasks To Drive You Ahead Of The Pack In 2008

Long Tail Dynamics
It’s 1987 and I’m standing in the checkout line at Tower Records with the hottest CD of the year in my hands. Clutching Def Leppard’s Hysteria, I pony up $12 and add one more CD to my collection, nearly surpassing my collection of cassettes. Complete article on Profiting from the Long Tail of e-Commerce

The future of search is unclear – what is clear is that change is rapidly happening for all of the top Internet search engines. Google as always is the frontrunner for many of these search trends, but even little guys like Ask.com are making waves. In this article, I will attempt to cover some of the more interesting search trends that are occurring today with the top Internet search engines – but I am by no means being comprehensive about the subject. Things are changing on a weekly, or sometimes even daily, basis, and future articles will cover additional developments in depth.

Complete article on Current and Future Search Trends: What the Top Internet Search Engines Are Doing

I’m sure there are many industries where constant monitoring and updates of news is important but is it evolving as fast as online marketing? Maybe I’m a bit bias , but being involved in constant search engine marketing projects has shafted twists and turns for me, forcing me to approach seo, ppc and affiliate strategies differently every couple of months for various projects. If you’re only just getting started, you do need to keep an eye on what’s going on in the world…daily! Complete article on Do You Know Everything About Search Engine Marketing?

An article released by comcore reveals exactly where people are searching from and this is an excellent scope for many companies to see which markets and regions to target. Searches will no doubt increase over time as internet gradually improves and catches on in the public eye. Complete article on Press Release on Global Searches

With the rapid evolution of the internet, so is the marketing aspects of most websites. It’s getting harder and harder to gain links with more rules being updated by search engines all the time, especially Google. New avenues of marketing are coming into play and we all need to jump on board and take advantage of these new strategies. Here are three strategies of gaining text links that you may not have tried yet. Complete article on Are you Gamesvertising, Feedvertising, or Blogvertising?

We thought we had it all figured out. But then Web 2.0 comes along changing all the normal strategies of SEO and PPC, glimpses web 3.0 is fast approaching. We have slowly adapted and accepted the idea of human editing and “social bookmarking” against traditional SEO, where we manipulate keywords, get links, subit to directories etc. How far will these changes go and what other developments of online marketing is still to come?

Web 3.0 Predictions

Here are some possible and evident trends:

1/ Video sites - This is a booming media avenue. Why bother reading when you can pretty much watch all the news? Why read books when you have scrolling movies to tell you the story. Website owners have already jumped on board with this trend, with Google themselves buying youtube.com, its a no brainer where this is heading. We will soon be watching TV, watching live sporting events, and even watching our families and friends online will gradually become more accpetable worldwide while the telephone will hit the dumps. If this ever happens…will we even need television? One monitor can do everything. This is already possible and happening in some households but there will definitely be a big evolution with video search and Video SEO and PPC in the coming years.

2/ Search Engines - People are becoming more cluey with what they are searching for online. They don’t just search for “widgets” anymore, for example, they are starting to be more specific and accurate. People are looking for “really cheap blue hairy widgets” (maybe a bit extreme, but you know what I mean). Vertical search engines are on the rise and the big players, Google, Yahoo, and MSN know this is coming. Vertical search engines, I suspect will gradually take large percentages of the world wide traffic. It won’t be 70% Google, 20% Yahoo and 9% MSN anymore (or whatever the percentages are), it could eventuate in 50% vertical search engines, and the other 50% will depend on how the current search engines cope. Imagine studying every search engines algorithm…good luck SEM marketers.

Keep in mind, the algorithms may even be solely dependent on human editing. Social bookmarking sites are already populating URL’s voted the most by humans to the top of their pages. There’s no reason why an algorithm and human editing combination could be noticed in the future. After all, the main purpose of a search engine is to provide relevant results for users and not be manipulated by SEO experts.

3/Maps - We can all clearly see street directories in our local suburbs, but now Google can even see individual houses and people nearby. They’re only photo snapshots at the moment but no doubt this could become a streaming video as well later. Give it another 5 years, and we could use video maps to see what happening on George St in Sydney.

4/Sound Search - A bit out of the ordinary. No real signs of this at the moment but radio, music, and any other form of sound could play a role. Just another strange possibility.

5/Spiders - At the moment search engines can’t crawl flash websites and can not determine its relevancy in their SERPs. Google have admitted that they are working on this already. How long it will take…who knows. This will depend on MSN and Yahoo as well. It will most likely be an internet technology related implementation. Im sure they’ll work together to come up with something. Spiders will be crawling everywhere!