SEO Expert, Anthony Yap

With the holiday season around the corner, many shoppers will likely use the search engines to research and/or buy their favorite item.

Internet Retailer reported why consumers use certain search engines. Of the four search engines surveyed (Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL), Google users perceived the engine returns the most relevant results coming in at 68%; Yahoo comes in second for relevancy at 33%; MSN comes in third at 8%.

According to NetCraft, a October 2005 survey yielded responses from 74,409,971 sites. During the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, the annual mark of 16 million. In comparison, 2005 added 17.5 million sites, the strongest year ever.

While the dot-com bubble may have burst, the interest and involvement of people and businesses in all things online is at an all-time high. Contrast that to back in August 1995 when Netcraft started its surveys, it found only 18,957 host sites.

OECD found in their May 2005 Eurostat Report that
Sweden leads the way with 82.1% of its businesses having their own sites followed by Denmark (80.9%) , Japan (78.4%), Finland (75.4%), Germany (72.4%).

The top 5 countries in which businesses that used the internet were Denmark (97.4%), Finland (97.1%), Belgium (96.0%), Sweden (95.9%), and Germany (94.1%).

While this may seem like a possible bubble, we believe it’s highly unlikely. The market is maturing and people are a lot more realistic about internet business models. With the growing “noise”, it would be interesting to see how the increasing amount of information clutter will be found and ranked in the search engines in time to come. Competition for rankings will only get stronger with each passing year. To survive online today and into the future, traditional business must use a combination of offline and online strategies to increase business profits. A healthy mix of search engine optimization, PPC, media buys, traditional marketing, PR, and of course, word-of-mouth is highly recommended for maximum success.

Yahoo just released a whitepaper on RSS usage [pdf] and a publishers guide to rss.

A summary of their RSS findings are:

• Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of
RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.
• 27% of Internet users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start
pages (e.g., My Yahoo!, My MSN) without knowing that RSS is the enabling
technology.
• 28% of Internet users are aware of podcasting, but only 2% currently subscribe
to podcasts.
• Even tech-savvy “Aware RSS Users” prefer to access RSS feeds via user-friendly,
browser-based experiences (e.g., My Yahoo!, Firefox, My MSN).
• My Yahoo! has the highest awareness and use of any RSS-enabled product.