Warmest Greetings,

:: Saturday, January 03, 2004 ::

I had to laugh out loud when I saw this, written by Ammon Johns (aka Black Knight) at Cre8asiteForums.

"...means we can expect even more hare-brained, knee-jerk laws proposed and passed by people who don't even use the Internet."

We were musing, in a thread, about what may happen in the year 2004. I asked those with crystal balls to see into the future. Ammon replied:

"2004 is going to be a wild ride for those involved in SEO, I'm certain.

Google is currently tweaking its new filters to refine them and should calm down a little, but With Yahoo holding a whole raft of ace search technologies too, with the ability to release a hybrid of Inktomi, AllTheWeb and Altavista into a single search engine (with all the advertising and PR muscle of Yahoo behind it) ... well, that's quite an ace still in the hole.

What if MSN does its deal with Google just to help keep balance going between Yahoo and Google, keeping each from dominating until Microsoft are fully ready to play their own cards? I think we can probably expect just that.

More and more PPC engines are coming up, not just providing search engine results, but tapping into the Adsense style market, placing sponsored links on topical websites as syndicated advertising. It may not be actual SEO, but it will certainly still have great significance to our market."

Whether or not he nailed everything as an exact occurance, one thing most SEO's are aware of is that 2004 is going to be challenging. I'm happy to see this because SEO was getting boring to me. Why? Because all anyone cared about was Google and Page Rank. Now, the playing field has more players and SEO's who aren't solely reliant on PPC submissions will have something fun to do and experiment with.

Just like in the old days!

Meanwhile I'll be concentrating on what happens when people find those well ranked websites. I wrote a bit about it here in Rank High and You Will Be Browsed, where you'll find such brilliant points such as "That's about as nuts as me putting on a ton of makeup and pushup bra and standing on the street corner hoping to get noticed and having to pay each person who just looks at me. (Great for the ego, but who in the heck can afford that?)"

One of the Tech Admins for Cre8asiteForums, "Grumpus", has come up with a new theory and explains it in Can You Get TOO Usable? (Of Blinders and Peanut Jars)
"Is there a time or a set of circumstances when you are better served by putting a link or a button in the "wrong" place just so the user has to look around for a minute - and maybe spot something else that they never knew was there?"

In case you missed it. Web's inventor gets a knighthood (See also DMOZ)

"The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work.
Dubbed the "Father of the Web", he came up with a system over 10 years ago to organise, link and browse net pages."

Not everyone is driving a broadband racecar in the USA. December Bandwidth Report shows "Overall, broadband grew by 0.62% in November, with 41.5% of Internet-connected U.S. households enjoying a high-speed connection. 58.5% of US home users dial into the Internet with "narrowband" connections of 56Kbps or less. "

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 1/03/2004 03:55:03 PM

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