I started this blog to talk not only about SEO and the steps you need to make your online business successful but also related subjects which catch my attention. Whilst my personal interests range from Zen to Quantum Mechanics I do discipline my focus, here are least, to subjects which bear a little on SEO or the development of online business even if the connection is tenuous at best.

The old saying that a cobbler’s kids often go without shoes could not be truer when to comes to Google and SEO. The search engine which almost single-handedly gave birth to SEO as we know it and which still has the power to wreck the day of countless search engine optimizers and webmasters is not quite up to scratch when it comes to optimizing its own websites.

I have given talks to companies and held one-to-one seminars for individuals and the moment I mention SEO strategy I pretty much get the same reaction. First there is that slight furrowing of the eyebrows as they consider what they know about search engine optimization, or what they think they know, then they start to tell me about placing postings on networks and spending endless hours doing keyword research and finally they tell me proudly about their content creation strategy and how this reflects well upon their organization.

It has always been an oxymoronic practice of large businesses that the moment they hit tough times they upped their ad-spend budgets. The rationale behind it was that since customers dropped their spending they needed a reminder of how great a company’s products were and needed to think about buying more.

Like everyone else, in the online world I suffer from too much work and too little time to sleep. Because work is something I cannot cut down on and life is something I do not want to cut down on I inevitably end up cutting down on sleep time. This means that I am always on the lookout for SEO shortcuts, ways to optimize a website which require less time to do or some kind of SEO trick which will allow me to do more for less effort.

I remember in the early days of IQ tests, those of us who were good at English at school would come out as damn near geniuses. That’s because IQ tests then were biased towards language skills and vocabulary acquisition which kinda left those mathematical geniuses who could flip differential equations in their heads for fun feeling a little bemused and very disillusioned.

As I am writing this my book, SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page is riding high on the Amazon.co.uk best seller charts at the number 17 slot which is great (plus the highest it’s risen since it first came out in January this year).

After months of talks, vacillations and the necessary scrutiny by the anti-trust regulators BING and Yahoo! have finally received the greenlight to hop into bed together, effectively turning what used to be a three-way in search into a tug-of-war between Google which has 70% of the search market in the US and 85% of the global search market and BING-Yahoo! who now have a 30% share.

Once we get past the obvious question of ‘I want to get my website on the first page of Google’, which every webmaster requests as a mater of course, the real question to ask is ‘How much is a first page Google listing worth to your business?’.