chasing

It's a common occurrence. SEOs often spend countless hours trying to "break" a search engine's algorithm.

Every day, more and more of us begin new online business ventures, hoping to make a better living or just a little extra on the side. And every day, more and more of us fail.

CEO Steve Ballmer says the Redmond-based software and game console maker will catch Google in six months.

Flashback 5 years just before the dotcom bubble burst and you'll remember the name of another company that blazed the path Google's following long before Larry and Sergey were even out of their dorm rooms. I'm talking about Yahoo!.

I used to be a strong proponent of common-sense SEO and a detractor from optimization by algorithm chasing.

Last week the drug manufacturer Merck pulled their pain relief medication Vioxx (rofecoxib) from the market due to studies linking higher incidence of heart attacks and strokes to long term use of their medication. The highly profitable medicine was aimed at Rheumatoid Arthritis sufferers and others who weren't able to stomach aspirin, which is arguably more effective than Vioxx is for most pain relief.

We all know that the best way of getting quality, free traffic is by achieving a first page ranking on one of the main search engines. For the past few years, Google has held the position of being the most popular and probably the best search engine there is and as such, this is the search engine that everyone wants their site listed on.

In a recent article, Andrew Ehrenberg writes that "many goals in marketing are unrealistic" and "doomed to failure from the start." His comments appeared in a piece titled "Marketing: Are You Really a Realist?" in Strategy+Business, the newsletter from Booz Allen Hamilton, the global management and technology firm.