Extremely expensive (CPC)
That is a sign of many advertisers biding for the keyword they think is important for their business. In some cases it might be just the two advertisers having their private price war.

Unexpected big drops (in CPC)
Some keywords show huge cost per click drops, and become cheep. That is mostly the result of the big player (the big AdWords spender or a number of them) leaving the marketplace, usually with their marketing budget all spend for the period, and the keywords CPC price drops drastically.

The overall size of the Irish PPC market seems to be shrinking during early 2009. Both Google AdWords and Google AdSense publishers can see it clearly. Recession is here, and is here to stay with us for some time. It is having the impact on the online marketing and the PPC budgets are suffering in this volatile market.

I read somewhere a comparison of the search engine optimization and a weight loss:

Search engine optimization as a weight loss takes time. No quick fixes available.

You need to make changes to your site and to your diet. No changes made, and sometimes drastically changes, no (rank) gain or (weight) loss.

You must be in it for a long term.

‘One size fits all’ product does not exist. As our bodies are different, our habits (how much do you eservice each day?), the web sites are different. The web sites compete in the different markets, where some are crowded and some are there to be taken easily. The search engine optimization packages like Bronze, Silver & Gold will do no good to the 95% of the web sites. It will do no harm, but also you will not see any measurable improvement in your revenue after investing in those once of ‘Perfect Fit’ search engine optimization packages.

Understanding is the key to success. What you eat and how much of it, and how much do you exercise is the basics of any weight loss program that will deliver a result. Having a proper content on the site correctly ‘presented’ to the search engine, with the correct amount of links to your site from the ‘important’ sites to your market is the key to success. The rest is just marketing and packaging of eh search engine optimization service. The rest is a vocabulary of the sales man.

The world of internet marketing is changing. Where are those banners from the ’90-ies? Google made a revolution with its AdWords pay per click programme that dominates the internet advertising market. No other competitor actually ever came close to the Google’s AdWords. The predictions for the future are further growth, in this booming industry.

One thing caught my eye, and that is the comparison of the search volume of the two abbreviations the pay per click – PPC and the search engine optimization – SEO. PPC was dominant but SEO was catching up in the last couple of years. In the last couple of months it is actually hard to separate the two keywords. It just shows the growing importance and awareness of the search engine optimization in the internet marketing world.

Yahoo has a bit strange ‘Go To Market’ strategy in letting only a limited number of users to it. Their message printed between the lines is that if you become an advertiser with the Yahoo Search Marketing – ‘apt’.

And this is where Yahoo got it all wrong and missed a huge opportunity. Yahoo is here just chasing the direct revenue, with giving a free Yahoo Web Analytics to those who pay for advertising in their channel. What they should have done instead is to use the same carrot on the stick approach and give it free to the publishers of their ads. It would widen their ads network and made it more interesting to the advertisers.

But then again, Google with its the largest online advertising channel AdWords, is giving Google Analytics for free to anyone? Yahoo should have a much better product to create a compelling reason to switch.

A raising number of the businesses are linked one way or another to the Internet, and with it in some way with the search engine optimisation (SEO). Interment marketing plays the more and more important role every day, simply since people use internet more and more in their everyday life. Even if you see something in your local shop, you are quite likely to go online and just check the prices in the other shops, and the user reviews, the manufacturers web site…

Companies know nowadays they need to invest heavily in the Internet Marketing. Pay Per Click (PPC) is where almost everyone starts, just being seduced by the simplicity and the transparency of it. Of and not to forget – the low cost entry to the market. Some take a few days, but the majority of the PPC advertisers require more than a year to realise the real costs of the PPC, and get to the ‘Panic Mode’ looking for anything else but PPC after realising how little they got for their money invested.

A strategically important decision is usually made then, to stop the PPC and get down the organic listing route and optimise the company web site for the search engines. SEO usually then becomes a ‘Hot Potato’ in the company. If there is a separate Marketing Department and the IT Department, they will try to pass it on to each other. IN reality, the likelihood that any of the internal resources knows enough about SEO is fairly slim, since SEO is not what the company has been doing so far. So a new type of task is now within the company, and a new skill is required. The management usually fails to understand the fact that the SEO skills do not exist within the staff of the company. Therefore the majority of the initial SEO efforts are performed ‘in house’. When no results are achieved, or the results have no impact at the bottom line, the question gets raised:

To outsource or not to outsource the SEO, the question is now….?

Management will be guided by the costs of the both options to determine what route to go. Seeing the quotes from the SEO companies, as opposed to the ‘zero’ cost of performing the SEO internally puts them in front of the simple position to decide to keep the SEO in house!

This is the list of questions that should help determining if to outsource or keep the SEO in house:
1. Do we have a resources available to allocate to the SEO?
2. Do we have anyone who knows how to do SEO tasks?
3. Do we know what tasks are actually required to be done at all?
4. Do we know how much will the training cost to get our staff in the position to do SEO tasks?
5. Do we know how much time will be required to get the staff trained, and when will the training be available?
6. Do we know what is our SEO goal (why do we do it actually) in the exact numbers?
7. Can we measure our SEO successes (and failures)?
8. What is the budget for the SEO software and online tools required to perform the SEO tasks?

The above are really just the basic questions. If you cannot answer just one of those, the likelihood of any effect of your internal SEO efforts on your business are very slim.