And that’s all it has been doing—nothing has changed or become particularly more robust. You can add a feed of your flickr photos, links to all your blogs, and there are a few cursory implementations of various Google APIs (a non-dynamic maps image that shows where you’ve lived) to fill out the page.

But does Google have something else in store for its profile? Could they be planning something big and just waiting to release it? We know they’re trying to change the game in regards to online collaboration—just look at Google Wave—but will they try something similar here?

Google Already Has a Social Networking Application.

Yep, it’s called Orkut, and chances are you probably don’t use it. Unlike the ubiquitous facebook, orkut never really caught on in North America or the UK, and most of its user base comes from Brazil and India. While those are most definitely not places to be ignored, it’s safe to say that any big Google innovations are generally going to be ‘launched’ with the English-speaking market in mind. It’s just the way things go, Google being a Silicon-Valley based company.

So if Google would already like you to use their social networking platform and you’ve politely declined, is the point of Google Profile pretty much exactly what it says? That it provides a home for your contact information as searched with Google, and nothing more?

Why Profile is Currently Limited, But Might Not Be For Long.

At the moment, yeah—that’s pretty much it. I started poking around for a way to display my Twitter feed on it, or my shared items in Google Reader, and they just weren’t available. All I could do was add a link to my twitter page, and Google had already provided a link to their own reader feed. No robust APIs were on display here.

Much of the reason Google Profile seems like it could expand into something bigger is because of its name. Profile makes us think of our facebook or linkedin profile, full of information, photos, comments, wall posts, posted items, and the rest. But facebook, until very recently, was a closed environment. It was impossible to access the feed of content attached to any particular user.

How Facebook’s Big Announcement Could Change Everything.

Now that Facebook has introduced their Open Stream API, however, all of this could change. Is there anything that might block Google from integrating the open stream of Facebook information into a Google Profile?

Not exactly, although Google’s own attempts to create an open-source, social media API across all platforms (that would be OpenSocial) read quite similar to what Facebook is now trying to do with its activity streaming.

Since Facebook has not previously embraced an ‘open’ style of development with its API, preferring to keep things closed for many reasons (monetization being one important factor), this tentative step in that direction is a big risk.

Once all the rich user data from Facebook is openly accessible, readable, and modifiable, who’s to say that Google won’t simply step in, harnessing its unbelievable search capacity, and create an open facebook-alternative, displaying Google advertisements and providing an even better user interface?

So—while Google Profile seems strangely static and rather limited in its scope at the moment, keep watching for developments among the big social media APIs. The framework for a potential game-changer could be sitting right under your nose.

“The only problem with search is that it’s awful, but other than that it works pretty well.” Tom Chi of Yahoo! Corporation said of current search engines. He was referring to the fact that although search is a wonderful and useful tool, it could also be a little more user friendly and helpful. “People are still doing navigational searches for Ebay.com” he added. This is significant because not only are they getting relevant direct results on their results page, they are also getting lots of other stuff they don’t need – both in direct results and in the ads section. It’s become “flooded with too much noise” as Murphy puts it. People hardly know what to do with the millions of results they get.

As a basic internet instructor for adults I see it everyday. Students look up at the top right hand corner and see that there are millions of results for “Gardening” but I can’t get them past the first page for some reason. If what they are looking for isn’t right there in those first ten results, they just give up. They would actually rather try another keyword than venture deeper in to the website. Occasionally I can get them to page two or three, but that’s as far as they’ll go.

Another problem is unintelligent search results. When users search for “eby.com” they don’t get anywhere, even though what they’re looking for is obvious. Major search engines aren’t compelled to change this because those faulty search results yield the same profits that correct ones do.

Yahoo! has started to take steps to help its search platform evolve through SearchMonkey, which I’ve talked about before. It is essentially a mix between a wiki and a search engine in the sense that it allows website owners, developers and programmers to create applications that enhance the users search experience.

Other search engines like are working on vertical search systems that give more specialized results. Siderean is interested in developing a vertical search for business tools, networking and resources. Both Yahoo! and Siderean are taking a smart step forward since part of the problem, according to Tague, is that search corporations need to solve is how to integrate search with social graphs and networking.

So what’s the future of search? Will change come in an amalgam of search, wiki and social networking? Or in an evolutionary bang in proportion to algorithms? No one seems to really know what the gen-next of search will look like. But don’t worry. Users can rest assured that the experts are on it.

Back in September news started leaking out that Google may throw out its deal with Yahoo!. The two companies combined currently handle 80% of internet searches all over the world. It’s understandable then why the US Justice Department was bringing up issues of possible antitrust violations.

Although the US Justice Department had already hired an antitrust litigator, Yahoo! was steadfast in calling the deal lawful, stating that “We have been informed that the Justice Department… is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but we should read nothing into that fact. We remain confident that the deal is lawful.”

Google may have seemed hopeful at first too. However, early this morning Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond announced that Google would not move forward on the deal.

“…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.” Stated Drummond in his blog.

Drummond also expressed his regret for having to pull out of the deal since the company felt that I would have been a win-win situation not only for Google and Yahoo!, but for publishers, advertisers and users as well.

Yahoo! had no comment on their Search Blog as of this posting. I’m sure there’s more to come though.

But that’s not all. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA teenagers have astronomical amounts of buying power. Not only do they hold their own part time jobs, but they also have tremendous influence over their parent’s purchases. According to the US National Center for Education (2008), there are approximately 15 million high school students and 8% of them (or 1.2 million) own an iPhone. In spring of 2008 about 9% of teens who did not already own an iPhone wanted to buy one. In six months that number jumped to 22%. Out of all the students who planned on purchasing a new phone in the next six months, 33% of them specifically said they wanted an iPhone.

Anyone in the marketing field knows that technology such as smart phones and the internet have become important parts of teenage life. They are incredibly dependent on these as an intricate part of their lives in school as a learning tool, socially outside of school and for recreational browsing. Granted they aren’t the only customers that businesses should cater to, but they are the immediate future of internet browsing and purchasing. Their habits are the future habits of America.

So the question remains: Do you have an iPhone friendly website?

With phones being so much more than just phones, it’s important that websites and bloggers ensure they are iPhone compatible. By either making your current website iPhone compatible or setting up an additional iPhone compatible website, you are making yourself more accessible to customers. Not only that, but your original site will collect more quality links for it.

There are two problems that iPhone users face when using their mobile browser. The first is a download speed that is slightly slower than their desktop counterparts. The second is the small screen resolution of only 320×480. Website managers need to develop a site that loads quickly and doesn’t force users to scroll through the page as much. They can do this by reducing (or eliminating) any unnecessarily large pictures, Flash or “heavy” content from the new/updated website. Also, many websites are optimizing, coding and configuring themselves to work with iPhones accelerometer so that different content can be displayed by holding the iPhone different ways.

It’s also a good idea to start developing some relevant iPhone apps. Applications for the iPod are relatively inexpensive and they are a huge market right now. In economically hard times, the iPhone apps can be considered a small, affordable luxury and provide the user with news, games, weather, music or whatever. Creating your own application not only helps to drive traffic to your website, but can make you a little extra on the side as well.

There are websites that can help you build apps and configure your website for use on the iPhone as well as other smart phone brands. However, you may at some point reach a point of difficulty that a professional becomes necessary. Whatever you decide keep in mind that the iPhones have been and will most likely to remain the most popular mobile browser in the world. But after the iPod phenomenon, did we really expect anything less from them?

“These highly relevant news stories and videos are being posted to the hackers’ fake blogs to increase the site’s Google search rankings.”

Webroot went on to state that “These fraudulent blogs contain several video links about the news story for which the users were originally searching. Once a user clicks on one of the video links, they are prompted to download a video codec that downloads a rogue antispyware program designed to goad the user into purchasing an illegitimate program that may put their personal information and data at even greater risk.”

The motivation behind all this is not surprising. There’s a lot of money to be made and according to Dancho Danchev, an independent security consultant and cyber threat analyst, ten or more malware blogs can start to appear in the top ten result pages in less than an hour. “Upon clicking the link, the user is exposed to the typical ActiveX Object Error message that is attempting to trick them into installing TrojanDownloader:Win32/Zlob.AMV with 10 out of 36 AV scanners currently detecting it (27.78%).” stated Danchev.

Granted, black hat is nothing new. What is unique is the fact that by using this ongoing research technique cyber criminals actually have a better chance of increasing their traffic and getting users to purchase their malware-ridden products.

How can you protect yourself? Webroot gives these five tips:

1. Always have a current version of antispyware, antivirus and firewall product;

2. Never download free product or purchase them from unknown Web sites and vendors, or peer
to peer networks;

3. Download videos and other multimedia files only from known and trusted Web sites or blogs;

4. Make sure the computer is up-to-date by always installing the latest Microsoft or Apple
security updates; and,

5. Use a credit card that has sufficient fraud protection when shopping and never use a debit
card online.

1. Content, Keywords and Links. As always ensure that your content, keywords and links are unique, of good quality and relevant to your business. Your back links should also be relevant so be sure to look out for and reject illogical links. Use absolute links which are less likely to have issues, but also allow you to get more backlink love if your content gets scraped. Remember that when it comes to keywords there is such thing as “too many” so don’t overdo it.

2. Make your links and keywords easily accessible to spiders. Drop down menus make the website user friendly, but they aren’t spider friendly. Somewhere on the page you should be placing good old-fashioned text links so spiders can find them. Also, be aware that SPIDERS CAN NOT CRAWL IMAGES OR FLASH. Be sure to label everything with text and include text descriptions so that spiders can find it more easily. Use minimal AJAX and Flash, and you shouldn’t be using frames at all.

3. Viral Videos and Pics. Enable the “Enhanced Image Search” option and list a video sitemap in your Google Webmaster Central account. Also, get your videos played on viral sites like YouTube, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Metacafe and MySpace. All these places are crawled by Google. When posting captions and descriptions for pics and videos use words like “image” “pics” or “video” since many searches for pictures or videos include obvious words like that.

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4. Unique Title Tags. Make sure that each title tag on your website is different and has a keyword in it. Don’t put your company name in there unless you are so big and popular that people ask for you by name. In other words, unless you’re Wal-Mart, Gucci, or Vera Wang, you should put your name somewhere else on the page… like at the end.

5. Interior linkage. When linking pages within your website, don’t simply hyperlink the words “click here”. Use keywords instead. So if you’re selling diamonds then hyperlink the phrase “Buy Wholesale Diamonds” or “Wholesale Diamond Information”. Also, if you have “index” associated with your home page (ie: DelawareDiamonds.com/index.html) then be sure to arrange it so you’re not splitting your links. You don’t need index.html, default.php or any of those. Your URL should just be your URL with a plain-Jane dotcom (net, org, edu or whatever) ending. When linking internally though, spiders and search engines don’t pay attention to your URL file extension.

6. Location, Location, Location. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, be aware of local search keywords. Don’t be afraid to put your location (i.e. Florida, New York, Presque Island,) into your keyword phrases. “Delaware Diamonds,” “New York Fashion” or even just “Presque Island Store” instead of “our store” helps people find you better. This is especially important if you count on your customers finding you online, and buying your products/services in-store.

7. Make sure to buy up any similar URLs to yours and have them redirect to your website. This is not the same thing as creating doorways, gates or mirror sites. What this does mean is that if your original URL is http://www.happybusiness.com then you could buy up http://happybusiness.com, happybusiness.net, happybusiness.org, and have them all automatically and instantly redirect to your original site. This typically works well for website URLs which are commonly misspelled by searchers. A good example is Barnes and Noble: you can enter www.barnesandnoble.com into your address bar and you’ll automatically be redirected to www.bn.com. Just a note though before you go buying up URLs; Don’t buy up links that haven’t been updated or used in over a month. The best way to tell is to do a Google search for “cache” plus whatever website your looking for. i.e.: “cache:www.whateverwebsite.com”

8. Sticky Forwarding. If you’re completely renovating your website and changing domain names then be sure to use “sticky forwarding.” This will allow users to get redirected from your old site to your new one and help them transition through the change better.

9. Check Yourself. Google up some server header checkers (you can actually do a search for “Check Server Header”) to get a tool that will check your redirected websites. You should be popping up with a report that says: ‘301 moved permanently” or “200 OK” if they are set up and used the right way. If not, either fix them or get someone to do it for you.

10. Guilt By Association. Make sure to run occasional blacklist checks if you are running on a shared server to make sure that you’re not sharing space with any banned or notoriously shady websites. This could actually affect your ratings with search engines. It also helps to make sure that your domain ownership information is visible by search engines.

11. Sponsorship. Philanthropy is actually rewarded by most search engines. Find non-profit organizations on the web, see if they are looking for sponsors and reap the benefits of those back links.

12. RSS Optimization. It is what it sounds like. You need to be optimizing your RSS feed the same way you would any of your web pages.

13. Beneficial Blogging. Your title tag and blog title are two different things so make sure you’re optimizing both separately. Use a “call to action” style of blogging where you provoke people to respond or react to what you’re blogging about. Also see if you can get someone of influence to post something special on you blog. Build up to it ahead of time: i.e. “Coffee Guru, Joe Schmoe will be posting with us on October 10th!” You can also ask the person of influence to post comments and opinions on blogs that you’ve written.

14. Social Networking is SEO. You can’t do SEO nowadays without incorporating social networking into the mix. Websites like Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us have become SEO essentials. Also, adding components like blogs, podcasts, social content, reviews, sharing apps, user ratings and comments help to boost your website’s “viral appeal.” It does take extra time and effort to do this right and not spam every blog you come across so make sure that you or whoever you hire knows what they’re doing so your website doesn’t get penalized.

15. Quality not Quantity. I know I talk a lot about page rank, but it’s actually not so important that you’re #1. There are plenty of websites that outrank the #1 spotters in hits, quality, sales and time spent on the site simply because the lesser-ranked website has better and more relevant content. Another important thing to do is keep adding to or refreshing the content that you have to legitimize your website to search engines. You should be adding new content or changing content about 3-5 times a week to keep spiders happy.

How you get listed in a directory is completely up how much you want to pay and where you go. Some websites will offer free submission or will list you at no cost if you are willing to add their link to your page. Be wary of free directories though since depending on how legitimate they are, you could end up getting penalized for link farming. More importantly though, you should consider paid submission sites because they practically never have a no-follow application which means your website will do better in search engine rank/ratings.

You have to be careful when submitting your website for consideration to a directory. Submissions are usually evaluated by real-live humans who are looking for spammers, black hatters and bogus or scammy websites. In order to let them know you’re legit, be sure to submit your website to the right category. If the directory doesn’t have a category that you really fit into, then suggest one and explain why you think you should be put there.

Hitting the web and doing some research on the directories that you want to submit to is the best way to ensure acceptance. Create a list of directories that you would like to be placed on and start looking into them. Some things you’re going to need to know are:

Mimic the Manager/Editor’s Preferred Style. Writing a very precise description that imitates the directory editor’s style will make it easier for him/her to accept you quickly and with few, if any alterations to what you’ve written. You can find this out by searching for businesses with similar keywords that have already been accepted. Look at their descriptions, keywords and categories and submit your keywords, description and category suggestion based on what you’ve found.

Equal, but Different. Ensure that although you descriptive style resembles that of the other businesses, your description still accurately reflects your unique business services. In other words if your company provides five specialized services or has a unique target market, then be sure to include that information.

The Long and Short of it. The criteria for business descriptions can be vary greatly from web directory to web directory. It’s useful to have several descriptions ready of different lengths. Have one that’s 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, and 200 words long. You should certainly include 1-5 keywords (one for every 10 – 20 words perhaps) but don’t stuff them in or make them too obvious since that will get you rejected. Keywords are allowed by web directories, but they certainly aren’t going to accept sketchy submissions.

Industry vs General Directories. When submitting to a web directory, keep in mind the type of directory it’s marketing itself as. Always be sure that your content belongs in the category you selected, your information is unique and your keywords aren’t crammed in there like a pack of sardines. You also want to place your keywords correctly so that search engines can pick them up easily. Only choose keywords that your company uses in the name or title of your website. Anything else may look suspicious and the directory manager will remove them.

Additional Things to Keep in Mind:
Always submit your homepage first. You can submit more specific web pages later, but it’s good form to start with the basics. Chances are that your individual web pages will be accepted if your main web site was.

Keep in mind that directories rank websites by keyword popularity within each category. I can’t reiterate enough that if you don’t typically use a keyword for your website in the title or business name, then don’t use it in your description. It will only get you rejected for looking like a spammer.

If you do get rejected you can resubmit your website after about four weeks, but don’t resubmit more than three times. After that contact the directory manager and find out what you can do to get in there. Sometimes it’s your keywords, submission lengths or maybe it’s your website. Getting into directories can help boost your rankings and they don’t have as stringent rules as search engines. If you aren’t successfully complying with them then you certainly aren’t going to rank well in search engines either. It would be beneficial for your website to find out what you can do differently and accommodate their standards.

1. New SEO tactics that wouldn’t necessarily be considered White Hat because still they involve manipulating content, keywords, codes, web pages and/or URLs to increase SE score and rank. On the other hand, they haven’t been deemed Black Hat by search engines yet. (Emphasis on yet.)

2. Another form of Gray Hat tactics are those that have been deemed Black Hat techniques, but are subdued to a point that search engines won’t pick up on it. An example might be keyword stuffing just under a concentration that a crawler would notice. However, there will usually be a high enough keyword density that a reader would be able to pick up on it.

3. Many people believe that Gray Hat SEO is Black Hat techniques which managers use in ethical ways, thus justifying the behavior. The reasoning is that Black Hat is typically used to spread spam, viruses, malware or promote scam-products or services. Legitimate businesses who are trying to increase their page rank feel that using some Black Hat tactics are okay because they aren’t spreading spam or causing harm to others. These “lesser offenses” won’t get them banned, but could get them penalized.

4. A fourth theory is that because search engines basically give score/rank on two things: Good search engine results, and lots of visitors. Gray Hat uses mild black hat methods to achieve white hat results in search engines in order to get visitors, but ensures that those surfers are getting the relevant and quality information they were looking for. This sort of goes along with all three of the examples above.

Gray Hat SEO tactics generally take longer to discover than Black Hat because the intent isn’t necessarily malicious. However even though you may take two steps forward by using Gray Hat, eventually search engines will have you taking three steps back. It takes longer, but White Hat has an advantage over other methods because the results are long term and ultimately bring in more traffic (and cash) over time. So really, it’s not an ethics issue. For true SEO marketing professionals, it’s just plain common sense.

Astro-Turfing
Don’t launch a fake PR campaign or create a social networking upheaval based on false information just to generate traffic to your website.

Celebrity Look-A-Likes
When someone posts blogs, or creates blogs and forums under the name of someone significant. By “significant” I mean either a celebrity or someone who is well recognized in their industry. This celebrity impersonator will usually post comments or blogs that are damaging to a competitor. A less illegal, but certainly just as immoral act would be if an industry guru posted discouraging comments on their competitor’s site anonymously to ultimately drive traffic back to their own website.

Cloaking
Another form of misrepresentation. It’s when you are Showing one set of keywords and content to spiders and bots and a separate set of content to visitors.

Code Swapping
Other wise known as the “old switcharoo.” This is when companies take a top ranking page URL (usually one they’ve purchased) and swap it around so that it shows a different page that benefits their business. This is almost always a temporary fix, so it doesn’t make much sense to swap code if you don’t need to. Most companies have legitimate reasons to swap around their code if they are changing their business model or even owners. However, swapping code for the purposes of duping search engines is against the rules.

Doorway Site
Similar to gateway sites, but instead of having a link or redirection tool that the user follows, the user actually never even sees the doorway site. It’s just a fake page used to trick spiders into indexing the main page higher up on the SE.

Gateway Site
These can be identified as web pages with practically no content in them except for some (possibly hidden) keywords. They usually have some sort of text in the center or up top that says: “Click here to enter” They have no use to the web surfer, and their purpose is to simply rank high in SE results so that people can click on that link and be taken to the real website, which may not rank as well or have scammy content.

Google Bombs
Remember when you learned that if you Googled “miserable failure” George Bush’s website would pop up at the top of the SE list? That happened because hundreds (thousands?) of people linked Dubbya’s Whitehouse homepage to their websites by hyperlinking the words “miserable failure”. That was just a collective joke, but when one person Google bombs it can get them penalized or even banned – and that’s not funny. A website owner can create a Google bomb by hyperlinking the same (usually irrelevant) text to the same URL on various other websites. This will allow them to jump up in ratings when people Google that keyword. That is, until they get banned.

Google Bowling
Google bowling is essentially sabotage. It’s when a company links SEO spam links to a competing company’s website in hopes that Google will penalize or banish their competitor.

Invisible text
Not commonly used anymore since it’s easy to get caught. It’s when irrelevant keywords and phrases are hidden on a webpage by either making them incredibly small, hiding them in the html code of the page, or making them the same color as the page’s background.

Keyword and Meta Tag Stuffing
When companies fill up their web page with as many keywords and meta tags as possible in a pathetic attempt to get better SE Ratings it’s called stuffing. Typically they are hidden, but many times they aren’t. Fortunately Google doesn’t view this as “quality content” and it won’t work.

Mirror Sites and Purchasing Expired Domain Names
Sure, those expired sites may have great page rankings, but by using multiple websites and using them as mirror sites, (or websites with the same content, but different URLs) and to create backlinks to your original site, you’re making yourself a likely candidate for dismissal and penalties.

Page Hijacking
This involves creating a duplicate site of an existing website which will ultimately redirect users to an unrelated website. This specific tactic is often used to download malware and spyware on to users’ computers once they have reached the hijackers website. Whether or not the real website is malicious, this tactic will still get you banned.

Scraper Sites
Otherwise known as “Made for Adsense” (MFA) sites. These websites use automated programs that steal and amalgamate various content from top ranking websites in order to create original looking content for themselves or a third party.

Spam of All Kinds
There’s a few kinds of spam that we’re talking about here. Most of these are blantently unethical, like comment spam or spam pages, but others like “wiki spam” were used commonly simply because the marketer didn’t know better.

Blog Spam (Splogs) are essentially “link farms” (a colony of web pages that all reference each other) and are created for the sole purpose of spamming other blogs and driving traffic to either their own website or another “main” website that the spammer owns. They can do this by placing links, keywords and hyperlinked text on random blog sites. It is often a source of comment spam.

Comment Spam is when a company posts comments in the blog, forum, wiki page, guestbook or articles section of a high-ranking website in order to improve their own standings on a search engine. They are usually obvious to anyone to sees them. They may or may not be relevant to the discussion, they usually contain some kind of link or information that leads the reader back to the spammer’s website, and they are chock full of keywords making it even more conspicuous.

Spamdexing or Referrer Log Spam. This works on the basis that when a web surfer accesses one website through a link on another website, the website that originally “referred” the link is entered into a referrer log. This is essentially a list of websites that have referred people to that site and is usually displayed publicly on a special “links” page. Sometimes the referrer will employ the use of software to automatically and arbitrarily access a large amount of websites over and over again creating numerous amount of backlinks through these referrer index logs thus improving their page rank.

Wiki Spam. Wikipedia started using “nofollow” values in their html code back in 2005 because of this black hat tactic. It’s when website owners/managers use the open edit capabilities of wiki pages in order to backlink to their own website. While users can still follow these links, they will not affect the website’s rank on Google since Google’s algorithm is designed to ignore “nofollow” links.

Final Word on Black Hat SEO
About a year ago some major companies were caught using interns to do some Astroturfing. (I remember one company was Amazon’s Shelfari. I know there were some others but I can’t find a record of them anywhere.) They hired on interns, told the interns to post spammy blogs on other people’s sites and when they were caught, the companies basically told everyone that they knew nothing about it and blamed everything on the interns. Although these companies recovered in the Google rankings fairly quickly, their reputation with customers and blog owners remained bruised for a lot longer.

The general rule of thumb is to be careful and do your research. If you’re trying a new SEO method or your not sure about something ask someone who probably does know. Hiring a professional SEO/SEM company is always a good idea – just make sure they have a “No Black Hat” policy. If you do find yourself banned or penalized by a search engine, don’t panic. Banishment isn’t necessarily final and neither is falling in rank. Contact the search engine and find out why then work with them to correct the problem. You’ll usually find that they’re pretty reasonable. They know that most SEO/M managers don’t do these things on purpose and don’t want to be tagged as a Spammer or Black Hatter. Unless of course, they were going to change careers anyway.

Luckily, for those who are running their business online, the internet could act as a kind of “flotation device” in which we can ride out the storm. Don’t get me wrong, the seas of our global economy will still be fairly rough, but online businesses can make it through if they play their cards right. So far US technology stocks have not been reduced to ash the way other industries have. In fact Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo and IBM are all in very good financial health right now. Internet usage is up due to an increase in telecommuting and job searches. Which also suggests that the search demand is growing (or at least not shrinking) too. Granted increased searches and traffic don’t necessarily add up to increased sales if people are just searching for new jobs. However since internet businesses don’t have any major connections to the financial industry they automatically gain more faith from investors and consumers. Also, the internet is notorious for bargain hunters looking for good deals on essential (and even some non-essential) items. The trend towards consumers purchasing less from the brick-and-mortar counter parts of online stores should increase dramatically. In short, there may be less frivolous spending going on in the near future, but more of what sales do occur will be online.

Also, as our new “Net-Gen” gets older and starts to flood the workforce, we should see many new innovations, uses and opportunities for the internet to boost our economy. We should see an increase in consulting, freelance and contract workers as people start their own home based businesses. Internet jobs won’t pay what they used to as companies try to grab the cheapest talent possible, but there will be work nonetheless. Online businesses have super low start up rates by nature so if you haven’t already, find your forte and hit it.

If you already own an online business, be sure to play it smart. This doesn’t necessarily mean play it safe all the time though. It’s better to take a risk on a project that has a more predictable or quicker return on investment, as opposed waiting until something “better” comes along. Stagnation is very dangerous in times of recession. It’s also better for the global economy as a whole for business to take care of themselves and invest their time and attention wisely.

Also, now is a good time to closely analyze your overall financial picture. If you don’t think, or don’t know if you can weather out the next year or so, you should either cut your expenses and ultimately jobs, or invest in growth (the smarter and more responsible of the two options). Invest in traceable advertising and marketing to make ensure you’re not spending more money than you need to. SEO, pay-per-click, email blasts, webvertising are all intelligent choices for online marketing. Just remember to use offline marketing wisely and keep your offline and online marketing mixes fairly consistent.