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It's the future of your online business - so stay awake and pay attention.

These days on just about every board you visit you will regularly see people hitting the boards looking for help with search engine optimization. At the same time the number of blogs and websites out there that deal with the subject are growing like weeds in a field ... and most of them are about as useful as those weeds that spring up everywhere and ruin good pasture.

And while that's all happening more and more people are tuning out when it comes to talk about search engine optimization. They fail to understand how important search engine optimization is to their business ... whether that be mainstream or adult.

Instead of trying to grasp the importance of good optimization ... or even learn the basics of good optimization ... they become bored when search engines are mentioned, their eyes glaze over and they desperately look for something more interesting to think or talk about.

We've got a mainstream client just like that. Good optimization is important to his business and within a few years it will be vital ... but he doesn't want to know about it. He thinks that he is somehow entitled to have the top spot for all the keyword phrases that are important to him and he fails to realize how much work goes into getting him to that position.

Even when we sit down with him over breakfast and try to explain what we're doing to ensure he gets those top spots in simple terms he can understand you can see his eyes begin to lose their focus. Suddenly it's all too much for him!

If you're like that and you find that talk of search engines and search engine optimization puts you to sleep then you better wake up because search engines have always played an important part in the success or failure of those small business people around you and they're about to become a whole lot more important.

Not only are they becoming more important but they're undergoing an important change in the way they view websites and list websites on the search engine results pages that they produce in response to queries from surfers. So if you want to succeed then you're going to need to have a grasp of what's happening.

Even if you don't want to do any search engine optimization yourself and you're quite happy to pay someone to do it for your business you will still need to understand the fundamentals. If you don't understand those basics how will you know that the search engine optimization specialist really does not what he's doing?

Over the course of the last few months I've already filled several columns here with the important aspects of what's current in search engine optimization and what has been working for us so I urge you to go back and read those columns. Some of the things I talk about will remain current even when the changes that are happening now have become as set in concrete as anything ever does in world of search.

One of the changes that's happening can best be seen in a new search engine that is currently in Beta but will become fully operational later this year. Hakia.com is a semantic indexing search engine and uses semantic indexing to find patterns in unstructured data ... and that changes the face of search entirely.

Go over to hakia.com and try it; at first you won't see much difference at all because the index page is quite similar to Google's front page. It's uncluttered and right there in front of you is the search box that everyone is so familiar with. The difference comes in the web pages it returns when you input a query into that search box.

Suddenly on page optimization is a lot more important than links - and it's not necessarily the on page optimization you think off. Like any other search engine that's out there, what makes it tick in the way it does is a complete mystery to me but run a few of your favorite keyword phrases through it and you'll see an interesting pattern emerge.

For a raft of our favorite keyword phrases there are some very interesting changes to the search engine results pages of Hakia compared to Google. Suddenly the big guys will a bazillion back links aren't on top of the listing anymore, in fact they're not even on the front page. Instead some pages that we've never seen before are up there in the top ten ... and so are we.

And if you think that semantic indexing and hakia.com aren't anything to worry about because they'll never de-throne Google then think again. Hakia may not ever take the place of Google ... but who says that Google isn't playing with semantic indexing themselves?

Don't think for a moment that I have some inside information on the subject ... or that I'm taking wild guesses either. All that I'm suggesting is that you do a little testing on hakia.com and compare it to some of the results you might see for comparable searches on Google. Do the searches on Google via the Google Toolbar with the highlighter turned on just to make it clearer for you.

If there is a pattern there that's worth following it won't take you long to begin to see it emerge. You might find that getting involved in search becomes so interesting that it may never put you to sleep again.