Last week I wrote about how the SEO industry is growing up. Tremendous growth and low barriers to entry are / will attract many new entrants to the market.

But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.

Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.

In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

Image - CasualChatters.com

Retail therapy helps us to feel so much better when things don’t go our way, and it would seem that the same is true for large corporations with lots and lots and lots of big bucks!

Image Courtesy - lemetrosexuel.com

Since Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! didn’t seem to turn out, they have found themselves with all this money for acquisition available and a designer outfit that appears to be unavailable at this time. Like any savvy fashionista, they’ve decided it was time to head to the mall for some serious retail therapy to make themselves feel better about not getting what they’ve been holding all that lovely money for. LO AND BEHOLD! Like spying the first Abercrombie & Fitch store L.A. (and a demographic to match), Microsoft has decided to head on over to� facebook and see what fits.

Image Courtesy - ab initio ad infinitum

So it would seem that everyone is in a race to become as transparent as possible.� It has become (clearly) evident that there is more revenue potential out there by opening up everything and making it available than there is by keeping it all horded and secret and hidden in the dark.

Cell phone technology is a brilliant example of transparency becoming extremely key.� It’s helping mobile carriers and equipment providers to quickly and easily design, develop, and deploy in tandem.� It’s also giving software development platforms such as Google and Microsoft the opportunity to build out their handset web technologies.

At the brink of an economic recession which will forever change the way we live, how secure is your job?

OK, you know this one:

It’s a familiar graph.

But for most of us that extreme upward trend has never applied to these:

Corn

Soy

Wheat

The price of food is rising at an incredible rate.

The managing director of the Asian Development Bank puts it like this;

"We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over."

So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google.  (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live).  Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.

Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think?  Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?

Image courtesy of rapidsharecinema.blogspot.com

According to the ComScore figures, growth in paid-search clicks happens to be slowing down.  Is it because of the economy?  Is it because of the “R” word that is being used in the United States?  Don’t know, but there was still growth in Google.  Certainly it may not have been huge growth like the numbers we are used to being reported, but still almost 3% growth year over year is substantial compared to the losses evidenced by the competitors Yahoo and MSN.  Yahoo paid clicks went down by about 3% year over year and MSN went even further in the wrong direction by a note-worthy 12%.  It all really does make that 3% growth in Google clicks stand out that much more, and lends that much more credibility to their reputation.

Andrew Goodman, of Traffick.com and Page Zero Media, and I are if not friends, well, at least peers with a mutual and healthy respect for each other both knowing exactly how long the other has been at this Search (whether paid or otherwise) stuff in this country. Over the years we’ve lunched, coffee’d and conferenced together.

And always, one theme has come up. When and why did Canada miss the boat when it comes to search and the Internet?

Coincidentally, Andrews post of today “When Registering Domains, Think Big”, he states:

Personally, I have a real problem with the .ca.

With the flurry of news stories running rampant over the past 24-48 hours, poor Scarlett Yahoo must be exhausted. Who indeed to take to the cotillion? There’s that awful Rhett MSN or that nice Ashley Wilkes Google.

Frankly, I’m reminded of the opening scene with Scarlett on the veranda cloying with prospective suitors and the saga is all a little exhausting. Makes me want for a nice Mint Julip and a nap until this whole silly thing blows over

Afterall, tomorrow is just another trading day.

Image Courstesy Businessweek.com

HOLY SMOKES!  I am completely blown away by the moves of Yahoo this week, in an effort to stave off the Microsoft takeover.  As of yesterday for a two week trial, Google will handle advertising for a tiny piece of the searches carried out on Yahoo.  In fact, Google will place ads alongside 3% of the U.S. queries on Yahoo’s site.  GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS ON YAHOO!!!  It would appear that instead of being eaten by the lion, Yahoo would prefer to throw itself into the dragon’s mouth!  I’d LOVE to hear what you all have to say about that, or what your thoughts on this maneuver are!  Doesn’t that actually reduce Yahoo’s perceived value as a search engine, having results served up by the competition?  Wouldn’t that also drive down the stock price, making it even easier for Microsoft to be able to pick it up?

Full Disclosure Confession: I don’t get the whole social networking phenomenon. Perhaps it is because I am a gentleman of a certain age. MySpace is mine and I have no real desire to share it with anyone beyond my other half… and my dog. I leave the Twittering to my parrot. I am not Facebooked as I have no overwhelming desire to make contact with my primary school cohorts. I am LinkedIn, but that’s about that.

And I actually don’t get it from a SEO/SEM perspective simply because there is far too much beyond my control which implicitly and necessarily implies I am a control freak. I am a control freak. And I like numbers that have relevance. Who. What. Where. When. Why.