organic

Searchers are more likely to consider purchasing, to remember specific brands, and to associate specific brands with keywords when ads are in the search results, according to a newly study from Enquiro.

So, what’s it going to be?  Spend the time and effort cultivating your organic search engine marketing plan or just offer up the cash and invest in a pay-per-click program? Which is better for you?  Both?

"Chinese Wall - The ethical (not physical) barrier between different divisions of a financial (or other) institution to avoid conflict of interest…" Investopedia.com "While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results." Google's Webmaster Help Center FAQ

I’m not sure if this can be filed under “lawsuits filed purely for publicity” quite yet, but apparently the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) is suing Google for selling the #1 organic spot in their search results. Now, either someone is confused, or the rest of the SEO industry is seriously getting gypped.

When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, I learned that the U.S. Food and Drug Admnistration would send the equivalent of undercover agents to industry trade shows. These spies would hang around company booths listening for any sales or marketing rep to make a claim or statement that violated FDA guidelines. The FDA would promptly turn around and fine the offending company.

Subdomain Spam Since Google has been over-representing site authority in their relevancy algorithms many sites like eBay have begun abusing the hole with the use of infinite subdomains. These techniques not only effect branded search results, but also carry over to many other competitive keywords. 

I read Tom Foremski's post, "Is search broken?" over a month ago, and I responded at the time by comparing the work you do for search with other ways of getting attention. But I keep thinking about the question Tom asked, and I think I have a better answer today than I did back then.

Even if a business owns the first organic search result for its brand, they should not neglect paid advertising for a very simple reason....