Sempo just released their survey for 2006 on Search Engine Marketing. In the survey, Sempo shows that Search Engine Marketing as a whole is up 62% percent from last year with spending in North America around 9.4 million. In 2005, estimation on spending was around 5.75 billion, which was an increase on 2004 by 44% and an estimated doubling of 2006 by the year 2011.

“These spending figures show that 2006 was a watershed year for the SEM industry. We have moved from the first wave of adoption of search-based marketing to the myriad of small and medium sized businesses, many of them startups, using SEM as a fundamental part of their business. In fact, many of these SMB companies have been founded on an e-business model and that is a huge implication for our general economy, going forward,” says Kevin Lee, member of the Board of Directors of SEMPO and chair of its Research Committee.

The yearly increase of spending is happening because online marketing is becoming extremely successful for many companies. As more companies begin to put there faith in SEO/SEM they are realizing that these online marketers are able to give them more bang for their buck then they thought was possible. Online advertisers are able to target searchers to a T with the precision that they have always wanted and the tracking capabilities to show what works and what does not work.

Due to the recent surveys and the success companies are having with online marketing, it is safe to say that Search Engine Marketing is here to stay. Having your company online is far from a luxury now, it is a must. With 16% of the world’s population, or 1.1 billion people able to find your business via the web, it is extremely important that all businesses are able to be found on the internet. It is just a lot easier to “be found” if you are on the top of a search engine.

More often that not, a website can benefit from using a text-based navigation instead of an image-based navigation.  It’s commonly understood that words that are placed near the top of your code (page) are given slightly more consideration and weight by the search bots in determining what your site is about.  Because the majority of websites have their navigation across the top of the page or down the left hand side, placing important keywords in your navi and ensuring they are 100% crawlable can help boost your optimization efforts.

Don’t know if you’re navigation is text-based or images?  Take your mouse and try to click and drag over the text within your navi.  Can you highlight the words?  That’s text-based.  If not, you’re dealing with images.  Of course, you can add Alt-tags to your images to help the cause (especially if you can’t replicate the look and feel of the navi with plain text), but there’s still no substitute for using plain old text links.

Generally, if you are hoping to improve your SEM for a given set of keywords, those keywords can and should be used in your main navigation.  You have a home page that is a  catch-all area that then directs visitors to the categories and main themes of your site.  Those categories/themes should be highly visible pages within your domain, and the best way to make them stand out, pass on optimal benefit through internal linking, and make your site climb the SERPs is to drop them as text in the main navigation.

Go on, give it a try.  While there’s still a good 50 little odds and ends every website can run through to ensure their on-page factors are optimized for the engines, this is a good start and a practice that most of your competitors will be overlooking.

This is an extremely common question that we get asked here at lifeBLUE Media, as well as one that just about every webmaster or blogger or company with a web-based business has to consider early on in their online campaigns.   Of course every situation is different - different competition, different costs associated with PPC and SEO, different barriers to entry, etc.  So what does it really come down to?  Here are the 3 biggest factors in determining what marketing online would mean for your site/company with regards to cost:

1. Your Goals - Do you want to dominate the Google Sponsored results and rank top 3 organically for highly searched keywords?  Or are you more looking to test the waters and attack a few niche spots?  In short, it’s important to realize that you can spend just about as much money as you want to spend to go after online success.

2. Your URL and Current Link Profile - Do you have an authoritative domain?  Are you already getting some good search engine traffic from a decent (top 100) organic ranking?  It’s a lot easier (with respect to time and $) to take an older website, with a keyword-rich domain and some established incoming links to the top than it is a brand new site or a site that has no current ‘rapport’ with Google.

3.  The Competitive Landscape - In conjunction with #2, how crowded is the SERP for what you’re chasing?  If you’re going to go after selling shoes online a quick Google search will show that there’s a lot of big name brands littering the sponsored results and the organic results.  That’s not going to be easy.  That means time and money.  Looking to target dermatology in the Atlanta area?  Not as tough, and therefore not as much time or money.

Those 3 questions are the most important to consider hands down.  I know that doesn’t help place a monetary figure on any particular campaign, but those are the initial questions that you should consider when starting your plan to market online.   Performing well with respect to conversions and marching your website up the SERPs takes patience, execution, and money, but rest assured that no matter what type of website or business you’re running, there is untapped potential waiting for you on the internet.

After exasperating all of your organic leads, where else is one to turn for new links?

Here are a few ideas that may help you grab a few more organic links to help you get the edge over your competition:

• Offer some of your blogs or articles to Internet publishers, such as ezines. Aim for publishers that archive their past stories, which allows you to keep your links on their history pages for as long as the website is alive and kicking.

• Conduct article exchanges. Yes, they are almost exactly the same as a link exchange, but these are actually useful for both parties. Article exchanges do two things for you — provide useful and relevant content and a much-needed link.

• Finally, and this one is probably the most difficult, if you can get an address in the UK or Canada, then you are able to get into all of the UK and Canada directories. This would be the easiest way to create links, seeing as there are thousands of directories that are really good and relevant beyond the United States. Superpower no more.

We’ve touched on this before, but it’s so important that we decided to return. Anyone who claims that search is cooling off is likely to have pants ablaze.

But even we were a bit shocked when we read recently that 20 to 25 percent of the searches conducted by Google represent brand-new queries that have never been seen before (Thanks to SEOmoz for the reminder). Stop for a second and think about that. It’s simply astounding, considering the millions of searches enacted each day on the Search Engine of Search Engines.

It also underscores how challenging the field of search engine optimization and marketing can be at times, given the ever-changing nature of so many key elements. But that rate of spanking-new searches should also be a big red flag to companies and website operators — if you’re not investing in SEM/SEO services, you’re probably going to get more and more lost amid the shuffle of the online marketplace.

Keeping pace with that amazing rate of new searches is a tough job. It’s easy for companies to fall behind or fail to capture the wave of potential flooding Google every day.

Get your head above water. Give some serious thought to the importance SEM/SEO strategies can play when it comes to your bottom line. lifeBLUE can help you serve those millions of new searches every day.

PageRank.

It’s a term you’ll still hear kicked around in certain Search Engine Marketing circles. Try not to listen.

What’s the deal? Well, PageRank is a tool. The device is a basically a link analysis algorithm that assigns a value to each set of hyperlinked documents on a web page, then measures its relative importance. In fact, let’s allow the experts who created the tool — Google — to explain:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.”

OK, so there’s a barebones definition. But what does PageRank really mean, in the “Why should I care” sense? The reality is, PageRank isn’t the end-all, be-all in the realm of SEO. Like we said, it’s a tool. But it doesn’t replace the entire tool box.

Beyond PageRank, there are a ton of important elements that factor into your website’s ranking, include quality content and keywords. As a tool, PageRank doesn’t really get into keyword specifics, meaning one site can be ranked higher than another in the SERPs but have a lower PageRank than its counterpart.

Lastly, clinging to PageRank has just fallen out of fashion. With so many other factors and elements at play, businesses and website enthusiasts simply have to look at the bigger picture.

Turns out painting a bigger picture is one of our specialties.

A lot has been said recently in the SEO blogosphere about the good and the bad of buying links. Matt Cutts threw down the hammer in his blog with regards to how Google is restarting its quest to rid the SERPs of websites that have obtained their top rankings by “manipulating” the algorithms through buying links. Many SEO’s from around the globe have responded in kind that they believe buying links it still a viable way to improve a search marketing campaign.

At lifeBLUE, we have managed SEM campaigns for clients that have sometimes involved paid links. We don’t view it as a means to an end, but rather a supplemental bit of support for any top-notch SEM. The truth is, if you’re hoping to compete for just about any competitive keyword terms in Google, you’re going to have to acquire authorititative links that have targeted anchor text in them.

And what’s the best way to get that done? By creating compelling content that results in links (link bait), by blogging, by developing resources within your industry and by buying links. All pieces of the pie are equally important when we are running a client’s campaign.

Over the years there has (basically) emerged a right way and a wrong way to go about buying links that follows the same principles that differentiate spam from acceptable marketing. You can’t buy links exclusively to boost your campaign. You can’t buy links that all have the same anchor text and point to the same page. As always, it’s about being “natural” in your search marketing campaigns.

We feel we accomplish that by blending our link-buying activities seamlessly into our overall marketing scheme for every client, and never overdoing it when it comes to buying 30 of the exact same link. The only links that are truely worth buying are those that get prominent placement on leading sites in your vertical - those priceless ones that just can’t be had by link bait or tools or resources.

Thanks for keeping us honest, Google, but paid links will be here to stay for a long time.

That’s the start of one of the most popular questions we’re asked. So, we thought it might be useful to explain some common and relatively simple web marketing words:

Referrals - Referrals are the pathways that bring a user to your site. It is very important to know if your potential customer came from a website where you are ranking for keywords, or if they have come from a link that you have established on someone else’s website.

Hits - Hits are when a web server requests a file be brought to a specific web server. In truth, they’re pretty meaningless. They do not show you how many people actually conduct business on your website. Think of it this way: What’s the point of having 1 million hits on your site if no one does what you want them to do once they arrive?

Page view - This is when a single page has been requested to be loaded by someone visiting a site. On the web, this would happen when a “surfer” clicks on a link that directs them to a certain site. This can be very useful to the owner of the website, because now you can alter site and see if those changes bring back potential customers more often.

Visits - Visits are when a person views all the pages of your website, or when that person has been on your website for a select period of time, usually somewhere around thirty seconds. To go a step further, a unique visit means that you are counting each person who visits your website only once.

Relevance - Relevance is the importance placed on certain words within a website by the search engines, namely keywords, pages and websites. There are three different areas of relevance, according to search engines: Content, keyword and link relevance.

If you are just starting out with a SEO/SEM firm, these are some of the basic keywords you need to know. It’s either that, or keep nodding your head and pretending to know what those Search Enginer Marketers are blabbing about.