When starting a new business, entrepreneurs have a dream. That dream is that there is this great untapped demand out there, who are looking for something and not finding it. There are people out there looking for green widgets, and no supplier currently makes green widgets, and you're going to come along and sweep up this customer base who are waiting, just waiting, for a product like theirs to come along.

In modern Search Engine Marketing, that's impossible.

Internet marketers are watching the major search engines like hawks. They are looking at their analytics tools, their adwords tools, and their estimated traffic tools. They see what ordinary people are typing into search engines. They know before anyone what is becoming more popular.

And they're waiting. They're catching them early. A search marketer finds a term that estimates 50,000 search a month. He sees that the top results for that term are somewhat irrelevant or old. The top result is Wikipedia, or the top result is some news article from 2003.

And they register the domain name for it. Buy it cheaply off someone if necessary. And they build an ad site. They capture that 50,000 right away. They're fast and nimble, they know all the SEO tricks. Pretty soon they're the number 1 result. And it's going to be hard to knock them off that perch.

This is the efficiency of search engine marketing today. There is no known keywords that are easy to rank well for. And they know faster than anyone when a set of keywords gains or loses popularity. And they move with it.

And forget just "ad sites" any more. That was so 2006. Search engine marketers are moving beyond just Google Adsense and advertising based revenue. The company that owns "Phone.com", primarily known as just an advertising site, is building an actual VOIP product. They think they can make more money selling phone service than the $10,000s a month they're making in ads. And they're doing the same thing with "Software.com" becoming a software download store. The same company owns Chocolate.com, Jeans.com, Relationship.com, and a host of other good names.

The internet marketers have arrived. They're not just selling advertising. They're building businesses around the best keywords. And they're going to be hard to beat.

By the way, I searched "Phone" in Google. Phone.com is #3. Software.com is #3 for software too.

 

I'm starting to lose trust and confidence in Firefox. What has happened over at Mozilla to turn what was once the "standard browser" of technology-savvy people everywhere, into the browser that's always letting me down?

It started with the ocassional crash. I remember feeling kind of shocked the first time I saw Firefox 2 crash. After a number of years of being reliable and stable, there it was - falling flat on its face. Over time, as the crashing happened again and again, I was less shocked.

Firefox has gone through a number of security and stability upgrades. From 2.0.0.0  to 2.0.0.1 and on and on. Firefox automatically updates for me whenever a new stable release is pushed out by the developers.

But how did 2.0.0.8 slip out?

I started Firefox today, and noticed for the first time on a particularly ad-filled web site that for some reason Adblock wasn't blocking any ads. I opened the extension tab and saw this:

All of my extensions are broken. Restarting Firefox didn't fix it.

According to the official bug report which was filed TWO MONTHS AGO, developers are still trying to figure out how to fix it. Downloading the latest browser (2.0.0.9) or even one of the development builds won't do it.

Open source is supposed to be better than closed source right? Bugs are found and fixed in 24 hours, or so the story goes. I consider this to be a serious problem - all of my extensions no longer work. And as far as I can tell, this bug has been known for 2 months now. All-in-all, it's a huge knock to the reputation of the supposedly "stable and less bugs" browser. That myth has just been shattered, although truth be told it's been in jeopardy for some time.

 

Aye yai yai.

I've been following Jakob Neilsen for 10 years at least. Ever since a company I worked for invested in some professional usability equipment ($60,000 worth if I remember), and started video taping people using our web site.

Jakob is known as one of the top - and certainly most famous - usability experts in the world. His site is http://www.useit.com/

And Jakob Neilsen says I should stop blogging and actually write useful articles instead.

His advice actually makes sense. If you want to establish yourself as a top expert in some field, you actually need to contribute valuable content to the Internet. Simply a few paragraphs commenting on the controversey of the day (as this very post is doing), doesn't really contribute.

In actual fact, the goal I guess is to get people linking TO YOU and having them do the commenting on your work, instead of linking to other people. This has SEO benefits as well, because establishing yourself as a recognized expert in a field, which causes people to link to you, makes Google think you're a great destination to send people, and so they send more, and it's a "virtuous circle".

What I might do is turn some of my best blog posts, where I think I'm actually contributing new content and not just insights and commentary, into articles with their own organization and hierarchy. Put that on my to do list.

 

I have an ongoing theme over the history of this blog: how much does the United States owe, and what's the credit card limit up to now?

According to the U.S. Government, the current debt stands at $9.111 Trillion. It's odd typing such a large number. I'd rather prefer saying $9,111 Billion. A billion dollars is a heck of a lot of money, and we as normal humans can't even properly fathom a trillion. It's beyond comprehension.

And the last I heard the statutory debt limit was $8.97 Trillion. So they much have increased it without me noticing - and they did increase it early in October. How come this didn't make the news? A quick Google search tells me the current limit is $9.815 Trillion.

I guess in an election year, they want to give themselves a lot of room to spend so that they don't have to debate the level of debt on the nightly news.

 

Someone recently hired me for a very specific task: improve their site ranking in Google for some specific search terms.

I thought that was a fairly easy task. One look at their web site made me see that their site was quite search engine unfriendly - a lot of images with text in it. Obviously, as pretty as your site is, if Google sees page after page of blank space, its not going to think very much of your site.

So, I went through all their HTML, changed many of the text-images to just text, and added alt text to the others that I didn't want to change (like headers, and text with graphics behind them).

And now I wait. And wait. And wait.

The problem now is that Google isn't coming back to reindex their site. Google did make an appearance in October, but that was before I had uploaded the new pages. And since October, Google hasn't been back.

So, this is the SEO dillemma. In an ideal world, I could make a few changes to the site, watch for the reaction in Google. Make a few more changes, and check the reaction. Rinse and repeat. But if I have to wait a month or TWO each time, that kind of makes it difficult.

I understand Google has various spider priorities, where they visit CNN.com 100 times per day, visit my site once per day, and apparently visit my client's site once per month or less. I wonder how long it will take to get Google to visit my client's weekly at least. Is that even possible? I'll let you know, as only time will tell.

(And I wait. And wait. And still waiting.)

I've heard of Waxy Links here and there. But until I actually visited there today for the first time, I didn't "get it". Now I get it. A lot of really interesting stuff there. Check it out.

 

OK I admit I could muck this up.

But I'm going to try upgrading my blog software. Hold still, this could hurt.

Update: The upgrade went pretty much without a hitch. I love when that happens. I'm now running on the next version of dasBlog 1.9. And I found this new theme, which I love so far.