Menu

• Dictionary
• Hot Shots

Directory

• Sponsors
• Billing Options
• Content Providers
• Web Hosting
• Traffic Counters
• Website Designers
• Resource Sites

Well my work day is really out of shape today. I've usually got this column all sewn up, signed, sealed and delivered before breakfast but not today. Right now it's just after midday and I'm finally sitting down to write something insightful, entertaining, witty and educational and do I feel like doing that?

Well no I don't. Today's one of those days when I'm just plain scratchy. I've got a heap of work to do but I don't want to do it. The sun is shining and it's a beautiful day outside but I don't want to go out there either. I don't even feel like sitting down with a good book or a mainstream site that I want to build.

I've tried all my little routines that usually get me in the mood for work ... and they've failed. I've wandered through blogs, I've looked at stats and I've even installed a new script on one of my sites that will show me via a graph how often the three major search engines spider my site ... and I'm still not inspired to get on with some work.

Even a look through Hitwise, something that is almost guaranteed to get me wound up into a frenzy of thinking and typing just isn't doing it for me today. Although I did see that Hitwise have discovered some interesting sites hitting the top listing for 'Mother's Day'.

It seems that if you want to grab the top listing for that term then here's your chance because the competition seems rather weak despite the fact that searches for that term have been increasing over the last few weeks and, according to Hitwise, were 6% higher last week than for the same period last year.

So if you're into mainstream marketing and you've got something that would sell well for Mother's Day now's the time to get cracking on building some pages that focus on that term. Of course one of the biggest hurdles that you might have to overcome is formed by a couple of mother's day videos on Youtube.

Even though you may be able to get a text entry above those videos they're still going to attract the eye of anyone who gets to that page when they search for Mother's Day. It seems that video links that appear anywhere above the fold get quite a few hits simply because they're different to the average text entry.

Now there's a little hint for anyone who is having a battle to reach the top spot for a search term. You don't have to beat those sites in the top two or three spots for your favorite term to get traffic. All you have to do is get an interesting video link up above the fold for the term you want and people will notice that link before they pay a lot of attention to the top two or three text links.

Of course you could see the look of search engine results pages - especially those belonging to Google - begin to change in the near future. You would have to be deaf as well as blind to have missed the headline story that has been hitting the TV and the newspapers about the drop in Google's revenue from pay-per-click advertising.

At the moment some analysts are content with the drop that they've seen and don't see it as anything worth getting worked up about but if a drop in earnings is likely to carry on into the next quarter then Google will want to do something about it before it carries on through the whole quarter.

One way to do that is to make the pay-per-click links more attractive to surfers and the easiest way to achieve that is by putting more pretty pictures in there to capture the attention of those who are searching. Of course if they do that then life will be just that bit harder for those of us who chase good organic listings.

If that is yet to come then some things may have already changed and it seems that there has been a movement in the force just lately. Suddenly we're beginning to receive more and more link requests and some of them are just getting sillier and sillier. One that just rolled in a few moments ago was seeking a link on one of our mainstream sites that advertises our online services and it came from another online business in the same vertical that we're in.

Now why on earth would I want to exchange links with a competitor? I guess that there will be some silly people out there who will take up the offer of exchanging links in a situation like that ... after all there some people who insist on putting Adsense ads on their mainstream business sites ... but I'm not one of them ... even on a day like today.