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I beleive that this represents greater opportunites for the SEO world in general based upon the following:
We've already come to accept advising our clients about paying for getting into the directories. Now this might have to be taken one step further for the PFP thing. "Factor this into the budget" we tell them.
Goto is only displaying between 2-5 listing on all the search engines, so there is still plenty of good rankings available on the first two pages.
Now a website owner knows that being on the internet isn't free and he needs to pay if he wants to have any traffic. Once this idea has sunk in, there will be an even greater demand for SEO as business owners don't want to spend all this money to get indexed and not be found. So whether we evolve into PPC managers and SEO specialists, the market is still wide open.
Note: I do believe that some sort of exemption for payment should be made for educational, non-profit non-commercial sites.
Feedback greatly appreciated on this topic.
I have said this before but will repeat it here.
PPC is great tool.
It will allow a client to get to market in as little as 30 minutes.
Client can budget BIG bucks for 3 to 6 months while waiting for a deep crawl, then scale back.
Client can use it as INSURANCE. If AV does an endo, client can scale back up with PPC.
The use of PPC & SEO makes us "traffic controlers" and we deserve BIG BUCKS to implement & monitor the plan.
It is the small mom & pop sites that worry me. The local hardware store that wants to put it's ad flyer on the web, or the local guy selling mail order flower seeds. Those people are getting shut out in the cold. They can't afford to pay for Goto to send them clients. The return rate on some of those are 5000k hits to one (not uncommon) and they can't even afford it at .01 cent per click.
Other non-profits like schools and even some colleges that are all but locked out of SE's. Where can I go to find actual information? With all the SE's becoming business directories, users are going to start to resent being sent to only commercial sites when they click. Users that aren't in shopping mode, are going to have to wade through results after results to find any real information they want.
I was just at looking for updated drivers for a nice sound card I bought a few months ago. I went through most of the top 10 on Hotbot, Google, and Alta - they all directly lead to pages where people were trying to sell me a sound card. It wasn't until I went down to page two on HB, that I found anything out about software drivers.
That type of scenario is going to grow and grow. For me, I don't use an SE near as much as I used too, because I am tired of finding only sales information. If I want to purchase something, I'll add "forsale" to my search; but where we are headed, is if you had ALREADY added forsale to your search. The se's are slowly becoming useless for finding actual information.
It is time for the Open Search Engine Project. (I can do it for only $2.5 million! Who has it laying around? ;)
Why dont you ask Bill Gates! 2.5 Million is just a drop in the bucket to him. Better ask for 5 million just in case.
