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Wow this is definitely not a day that I want to spend working. It's a balmy summer's day and the bay looks so inviting! It's a shame that so many clients want so much done in the next few days ... but hey, I'm not complaining ... well not much.

Search ... if you're not optimizing for it then you're crazy.
Yesterday in my readings I came across someone who suggested that you would have to be crazy if you're not optimizing every single web page you produce. According to her you just never know when Google will make a minor change to it's algorithm and suddenly a site that wasn't ranking all that well ... or a very old site ... will suddenly zoom to the top of the listings.

Sure, adding keyword rich page titles, enticing meta descriptions and alt. tags to images can be a little time consuming but whether you're building free sites or galleries it can still be worth it. Yes, even with the limited text opportunities on galleries, you should still be optimizing your galleries for the search engines too. But why bother? Why waste time doing that when there are no guarantees that Google will kick the gallery or the free site to the top of the rankings?

Well there may be no guarantees ... but it certainly does happen. Right now I'm looking at a single page that has suddenly bounced back from nowhere to hit the top of the first page for a fairly important keyword phrase for a couple of businesses in the town where I live. It wasn't there last week ... and I don't remember seeing it anywhere on the first page ... and I was looking.

Last week one of our clients had been complaining that he had lost his top-of-the-page ranking for that term ... a position he had held for just about ever. His complaint then was that another one of our clients had grabbed that top ranking and they had ... for no other reason than Google had assigned more importance to one site more than another apparently after a recent algorithm change.

Well now that client will be even more unhappy because his site has dropped to number three. The top spot has been taken by a page that Steve wrote for an old directory site the client wanted a listing on back in early 2007. As far as we can remember that directory site page had never been on the top of page one for the term that our client sees as being so important and yet now, for some reason, Google suddenly loves that page and has boosted it right to the top.

So don't be lazy and don't be crazy ... take the time to optimize each and every one of the galleries you build and do the same for each page of every free site you build. You just never know when Google is going to give you a ranking you weren't expecting.

Search - it's not as well paid as you might think ...
... well that is if you think that mainstream SEO work done for others was likely to be highly paid. Obviously there are some people out there who really making a lot of money from that work but a recent survey has shown that there are potentially a lot of people in the SEO industry who are earning less than $50k a year.

It was also interesting to note that only 33 percent of those who responded to the survey had been in SEO for more than five years and the largest single group of responders had only been involved in SEO for between one and two years. Those figures look interesting and suggest that a lot of people might start but soon drift off into other career paths.

As one person suggested when commenting on the survey, 'Could it be that they lack staying power, they entered as a stop-gap or under the assumption of fast-easy money.' Now where have I met people like that before?

Just like the adult industry, there seems to be a perception that SEO is easy money and the reality is that making money in SEO is definitely not easy and certainly not fast. However, it is definitely interesting to note that in these tough economic times businesses are still willing to pay to have high-quality SEO work done for them.

There is no doubt that the current economic climate is having an impact on the SEO industry but the people who can produce results are definitely not short of work and that situation is only going to get better as more and more businesses realize that they get a great return on investment for every dollar they spend on search engine optimization.

And now I'm off to look at domain names for a client who wants to launch a new stable of sites. While Steve loves to immerse himself in search terms and statistics I love to go hunting for domain names. I know that many of you will think that just goes to show how weird and twisted I am but I love it!