SEO, SEM, web design, coding, iPhone, iPad, Android 

The highlights from the second day at the Mobile Search Conference 2007, held in London. Includes summary of sessions featuring speakers from Telecom Italia, Mobile Marketing Association and Wayfinder.

There is a great discussion going on over at SearchEngineWatch about the "Top 10 Key Search Factors in 2007."

The initial proposed list looks like this (with my comments after the topic):

1. Content - As we've mentioned before Content is King. However, with so many social networks (digg, reddit, etc) you have got to be on your toes to provide "new and interesting" topics.
2. Key Word Selection - If you don't know what keywords your users are looking for, then you will not be found. Simple as that.
3. Site Architecture - If they can't find your content (or find it again once they come to your site, you've just lost a potential customer.)
4. Rich Media - With the explosion of video mashups and YouTube, this one might take off. However, I'm still not confident that it will drive sales compared to just wasting people's time.
5. Web 2.0 -Getting more people involved in any given project has a couple of effects. First you can quickly build a following and interest in any given topic. Second, with more "open architecture" you can cross sell your product into other existing technologies and gain notoriety even faster than ever.
6. Accessibility - This has been a topic for a number of years now, but still hasn't really seen the attention that it needs to really succeed as of yet.
7. Inbound Links - Linking is Queen. What can I say, PageRank rules.
   
8. Relevancy - I clarify this by saying specialization. More and more people are using specific websites for specific searches. Associate with a group that has like desires, customers, and is mutually beneficial and become the "know-it-alls" about that topic.
9. Popularity - I hate to say that this one will necessarily fade until social sites create a better way so people don't game the system. (Remember the issues Digg had with so called popularity)?
10. Constant Improvement - Refine, repair, review, repeat.
    

Things that I see as being influential in 2007 as far as search goes are the following:

• RSS - With IE 7 supporting RSS, I see RSS feeds becoming an even larger part of keeping people and search engines up to date with new information. This also gives the users the opportunity to chose the way they want content displayed (larger fonts, easier to read color schemes, less noise, etc)
  
• Micro-formats - This one might just jump into the ring. As more and more sites support these simple standards information will flow more freely between diverse applications. If the search engines started backing these different micro-formats (like they did with sitemaps) more and more applications would be built to track and share the information.
• Tagging - Tagging has the possibility to become as large as linking. People telling people what something is about and liking it enough to go out of their way to say so.

I would add that I think that more and more "in-page rich media" browsing (courteousy of the mainstreaming of AJAX) will happen as people realize the benefits and as the search engines find better ways to index AJAX content.

Ecommerce business has come a long way and continues to evolve every second. The Internet is so dynamic and so are the individual driving it. As more and more people are using the Internet and becoming more familiar with how it works, we see more money being spent. Cyber Monday, (the Monday after Thanksgiving), is becoming a bigger and bigger online spending day with sales drastically increasing every year. The Internet is far from a trend or an idea anymore, it is a way of business, life, the present, and the future.

One trend that is developing, is that technology is driven by the Internet There are so many ways to access and surf the Internet now that we are not just limited to our desktop computers. Cell phones, ipods, and pdas are just a few of the small devices that we can surf the Internet with. For every one computer, there are four cell phones with Internet browsing capabilities. What this means is that soon you will be able to market to everyone where ever they are as long as they have a cell phone. In order to do that, you have to make sure your site is ready for it. As big businesses become bigger, small businesses have to get smarter. Localized marketing to the search engines and on the web is becoming a huge trend. In order to survive, smaller businesses must adapt and market twice as smart.

With an online business you have to be willing to work hard and put in many hours. Because your business doesn’t rest, neither does your competition. It’s very important to know what you are getting into and also to know what you need to do in order to succeed. There is a myth out there that setting up an online business is easy and can be done in no time. If you have a business degree, a computer science degree, an art degree, and some business experience it can be easy; but in all reality, many of us don’t have any of those so it takes time, hard work, and some studious study and implementation. Realistic expectations are very important along with the willingness to sacrifice whatever necessary to make your online business a success.

Search Engines are smarter than they have ever been before so anyone who wants to get results within those search engines needs to be equally versed in the ways of how the search engines work. They also need to understand that the search engine is not the only marketing option. The Internet is far from one search engine and a couple of thousand competitors. To be successful online you must do your due diligence along with keyword development in determining a niche market that has the ability to become successful. You do not make money just because you have a web site.

Recently, blogs are also becoming a very large part of the Internet Often times, blogs are the glue that brings together your traditional search engines with your newer Social Search Engines. With a blog you can have a non threatening approach in any situation with any web site.

Online business is not as simple as setting up a website anymore. The competition can be fierce! Hard work, value, quality information, and content is the only way to succeed. There is freedom with an online business, but freedom doesn’t mean you don’t have to work just as hard as you ever have before.

Most of us have heard about it, but how many of us have actually used it?  I’m talking about CraigList.org.  Yeah it may be a very simple looking site, but maybe that is why it has such a major influence among classified online communities.  CraigsList is very easy to find stuff on, but almost just as easy to post things on.  You can post products, services, gigs, resumes, and just about anything you can think of.  You can also be very targeted submitting to specific areas or even better submit to multiple locations and see what happens.  I know everything I have ever submitted to CraigsList.org has been free.  It can be a great solution for free advertising.

CraigsList.org is a great place to start and if you have not looked at it or used it you better as soon as you get done reading this.  Recent articles have pointed to the fact that CraigList has potentially blocked the search engines from crawling it, so you wouldn’t be using it for search engine traffic, (http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=182).  CraigsList is one of the most well known classified sites, so don’t worry about traffic.  You will probably get just as as much traffic without the search engines with CraigsList.

I challenge you to begin today posting something on CraigsList.  If you have your site up, great.  If you don’t, don’t even worry about it.  You can sell plenty of stuff through classifieds without even having your site up.  Consider it a more structured ebay with a more fixed price.

Let me know what type of experience you have all had with classifieds and specifically CraigsList by leaving your comments below.

Aside from having a search engine friendly website the most influential factor to gaining better organic results in search engines is by obtaining in-bound links (IBLs). In other words, we want other relevant websites to link your website. Be prepared for long nights crawling the web in search of websites to approach. Thankfully, there are a few things we can do to make this very important search engine optimisation (SEO) job easier...

Warning: This post is very "off topic".

The long awaited book 7 in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in now available to preorder from Amazon.

We preordered book 6 from Amazon last time and we received it on the release day without having to stand in lines to get it. The 7th and final book in the series has been available to order from Amazon in the UK for about a month or so already, so it is nice of Amazon to do the same for us in North America.

I'm going to make some predictions for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, just because everyone does (and of course I think I'm correct).

• Snape is not bad
• Draco Malfoy will help Harry kill Voldemort
• Harry will live
• Harry will become the new Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher.

There you go. My predictions for Book 7. Now, I just need to get my copy and we'll see if I was correct.