The search engine optimization industry has to be on its proverbial toes literally 24/7. This is because the search engines algorithms are constantly being changed and updated in order to give their searchers the best results they can.

There are two basic views that people share on the way search engine optimizers are adjusting their web sites to get in the way of qualified traffic, and they are that it is a fair way of manipulating search results, and second is simply that it is an unfair way of manipulating results.

The fact is, if search engine optimizers weren’t around, then the results you’d get from search engines would most probably be a disorganised mess. Search engine optimisation is necessary part of the results listings because it ensures that the best websites that actually provide what you’re searching for, rise to the top. The vast majority of web designers know nothing about how to get a website to rank highly search results, they almost always miss out the main things that search engines need to read your site. So lots of people pay extortionate amounts of money to have a stunning, captivating and professional website built that is doomed to either be sat in a pay-per-click listing forever, or to just be lost among the crowd of millions of other websites just like it.

We have no-end of clients that have been sold beautiful and expensive sites and told it will solve all their problems, when in fact it doesn’t really do anything of the sort because no one can find it. We are constantly speaking to clients who wish that they hadn’t spent so much on the design of their website so that they could spend the money on optimisation.

Common sense will tell you that there’s no point in having a website that no one can find. Even in these harsh economic times as turnover is dwindling and profits are all but gone, the forward thinking website owners will look to increase their market share by either starting an SEO campaign or adding new keywords to their current campaign. There are still buyers out there to be had, but they are simply shopping more cautiously and in fewer numbers, but what you as a site owner, you need to ask yourself is, are you going to be proactive and move forward to take your share of the market, or will you hang back and end up as another failure statistic?

The more traditional retail methods are suffering and online sales went up by 25% from Christmas 2007 to Christmas 2008. The companies that are making money are those that are embracing the new technologies and moving forward with everything around them. Others that found their form a few years back and will stick to it come hell or high water will be the ones that fail in this technological era if they don’t develop their services to fulfil the needs of the modern day customer.

It is unfortunate but in years to come, high streets and retail parks will not exist. More and more shops are being used as fitting rooms for an online buy later on. Its like were shooting ourselves in the foot really because when the shops are gone, all we will have is the Internet to make our purchases on, which will take the experience out of shopping entirely.

SEO will be driven by retailers needing to save money and increase footfall to both their bricks and clicks shops. It will be an interesting year in which I think we will see some more household names join, Woolworths, MFI, etc on the scrapheap. The big question is……. will you do enough to protect your market share in 2009?