It’s Search Engine Strategies conference time in New York this week.

And on the heels of the three day search conference, Jupiter Research states that:

A full quarter of 26% of large advertisers in companies with annual revenues of $50 million or more plan to increase spending on search engine marketing by more than 25% this year.

according to Gavin O’Malley of Online Media Daily.

PS - If ever you want an interesting conversation about search and search spending and retail, have a chat with Patti Freeman Evans, a Jupiter Research analyst.

Optimizing a site so it is delicious for the user to browse around and at the same time inviting to search engines isn’t the hardest thing to do as long as you stay away from these “don’ts”.

1. Don’t use images for text

Even though software like EverNote can recognize and index text in images, search engines can’t. Or don’t. Anything you write in or on an image is 100% lost on the search engines. Using the alt or title attributes helps a tiny bit. But the loss remains huge. Text: 100% score. Alt/title attribute: 0.01% score.

In a previous life, I ran a Bell project called VoiceNet (today its evolved into http://www.helloyellow.ca/) . Essentially, it was to be the first speech enabled portal of its kind anywhere completely speech enabled. When I say speech enabled, I literally mean that you communicate(d) directly with our computers … no human intervention. The goal was ultimately to speech enable the Yellow Pages to give cell phone users unprecendented access to such listing information without the paper product handy. What a great concept! Unfortunately, it was 10 years ahead of its time, and the general population just wasn’t ready.  Keep in mind, this was when search engines were in their absolute infancy, and Google was still not conceived. This was even before my days with Sympatico-Lycos … and that was quite a while ago. The project has fortunately been kept alive over the years … given its obvious potential.

It’s pretty amazing. These days all you need is a domain name, ranging in price from $2.95 a year to $29.95 depending on where you get them, and that’s it. Point the domain name to Microsoft or Google and you have everything you need and then some.

“Back in the days” you would have web site hosting and your email. With Microsoft and Google you get calendar, note taking, document editing and sharing. It’s a virtual office.

Web site, virtual office: perfect for business. Perfect for small business.

Let me be even more precise: perfect for local business.

First of all, credit where credit is due. Elixir Sytems, a search engine marketing company out of Phoenix has an excellent white paper on online reputation management posted on the SEMPO site here.

They’re definition of online reputation managment as a cross between marketing, public relations and search engine optimization is pretty much on the money. Once the domain of public relations, reputation management has witnessed a migration from the hands of primarily, the media into the hands of the consumer.

As should be apparent from a few of my previous blog postings (Should I use a .ca top level domain (TLD) for my Canadian site?, and Benefits of Being Recognized As a Canadian Site by Search Engines), we believe that most Canadian companies should be more diligent in ensuring that their sites are hosted on Canadian IPs … otherwise without a .ca they lose out on certain advantages. In fact, do yourself a quick favour, and perform a search on Google.ca for your domain name less the www and the suffix (eg. .com), remembering to check the “Pages from Canada” radio button. Does your site appear? If not, using one of the hosting companies listed below will solve the problem very quickly.

Here’s a rather interesting tool (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) that we use frequently at SEP to see how client competitors have evolved and are evolving. To some extent, we can use it to see when a client first tried optimizing their site. Its called the WayBack Machine. Believe it or not, it’ll show you a snapshot of what many sites looked like at periodic intervals in the past.

The tool is both interesting and useful from the perspective that it often gives a good indication what a company’s product/services were at given points in time, prices for products and services over time, even when a site began its optimisation effort, and if this effort is more content focused or “links” focused.

(of course substitute .com.au in Australia, co.uk in England, etc.)

Ahhh … a question we get often, and one without a standard answer. Rather, the answer is based on your particular situation. So, take a minute to consider the questions below, and voila, you’ll have an answer.

1)      Is your site on a well established domain?

While often overlooked by the masses, Google, MSN, and Yahoo all give Canadians different search options than Americans when searching the web. Each gives some sort of preference or boost to sites deemed to be Canadian within their Canadian search results, although offer no benefits obviously for ranking in the generic .com results. This means that Canadian companies need to be diligent about ensuring that they appear in the search results of the most used engines in their home country, especially since the advantages realized do not yet appear to be offset by poorer rankings in the generic .com engines.

A couple of weeks ago now, okay, a month ago now… The (SEP) Guy has been busy… Piper Jaffray released its Internet Media & Marketing Report.

One the more interesting findings was the opportunity that abounds and remains untapped in search. More specifically, in Local Search or to put it another way, Niche Search or to put it another way, Vertical Search. Greg Jarboe had an interesting perspective at SearchEngine Watch with Piper Jaffray Maps Out Where the Search Industry is Headed.