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Ok so I'm at my desk ... I've got coffee and I'm not wearing sunglasses ... so I should be ready for some work right?

Well ... wrong! Tomorrow's a holiday and we've just finished an enormous month so finding the urge to get down and work is kind of eluding me right now. But I'm going to have to get into the work groove soon or I'll be rushing to get things done before I walk out of here tonight.

Yesterday I had a potential client call us to see if we could do some search engine optimization work on her website. When she asked for some examples of what we had done I was able to point her to a site we had just launched two days ago for a client and it was already on Google's first page for a very competitive term.

As you would expect, she was impressed but now I'm beginning to wonder if we'll be able to achieve results like that for much longer. Google is not making things easier for people like us who want to achieve good country-wide results for clients but who only have a very localized base. That's something that's particularly relevant if you want to sell products online and Google only wants to show your potential clients what's available in their region or city.

But it could be getting even harder and a tweet made just a few minutes ago on Twitter could herald the beginning of some tough times for people who do search engine optimization. The tweet came from a well-known and well-respected member of the search engine optimization community and he asked,

"If I told you that what you tweet might possibly influence the search results you see would you believe me?"

And of course, if he asked a question like that, it's because he thinks he's seeing some trends beginning to appear. It seems that he feels that what he's currently seeing may be a sign that "lifestreaming data could be a way to personalize search".

We already know that Google's spiders are all over Twitter and it's quite possible for Google to link the data they find posted on a person's Twitter account to the searches they make on Google so why wouldn't they be using the data they collect to provide us with a better search experience?

Of course what Google considers to be a "better search experience" may have little to do with what really is a better experience for us but that doesn't mean they're not going to go on thinking for us ... especially when they know what we're thinking by reading our Tweets.

It's scary on so many levels that I'm not sure I even want to think about it ... or believe it just yet ... and what implications that might have for this industry if it is true could be anyone's guess but if it's part of your business plan to pull in traffic from the search engines then it's something that you will need to stay on top of. And obviously it's not just Google and Twitter that we need to be thinking about here ... what about Google and Facebook? What about Google and the RSS feeds that our target audience follows through Bloglines or one of the other tracking services that they might use?

When Google started down the path of personalized search then search engine optimization started getting complicated but if you can stay on top of it the rewards are certainly worth the effort.

And of course, when you read this it will be April Fool's Day. You can be sure that some of what you read today will just be someone's dumb attempt at being funny so be careful not to be caught. Like quite a few others I'm not going to believe much of what I read tomorrow and I'll be glad when it's all over and we can get back to some serious business.

These days it seems that most pranks on April 1 are done by people who aren't half as funny as they seem to think they are. I guess that's one of the down-sides of social media ... even the idiots get some air-time.

So that's it for me for this week. Steve and I are going to be taking it easy over the weekend and we're even going to try and spend an entire day away from the computer ... I know that's hard to believe but we know we can do it ... but we're not taking any bets on it.