Comscore says that Google’s search volume was down 1.2% in June compared to searches in May.

Yahoo 25.1%
MSN 13.2%
Ask 5.0%

The numbers leave little doubt where your search engine optimization efforts shoud be focused.

A Searh Engine Land article article by Stoney deGeyter lays out the age old question (in internet time); Is SEO affordable for small businesses?

Stoney sujests three main componets to finding an efficient balance:

Investment in Time
Investment in Budget
Investment in Neccessities

I agree with Stoney that,” As long as your marketing campaign is returning a positve ROI, then the true cost of SEO is affordable.” Still, it can be difficult to convince a client to spend more money even though they are making more. You run into a mental road block. The client has a budget number in mind and has difficulty approving anything past that number.

However, if you can prove to your client through data analysis that his ROI is worth the investment, your client may very well up the ante. Easier said than done, I am well aware. That is why we offer our local directory service (shameless plug). If you can’t afford SEO for your site, there are affordable opportunities out there. Educate yourself and be patient before stepping in.

Search Engine Watch reports that while most search marketers spend the majority of their time providing search engine optimization in dominant markets, there are fast growing multicultural audiences gaining momentum.

U.S. Hispanics are more intensive than the U.S. general market. The average U.S. Hispanic spends 20 percent more time online, with 25 percent more pages viewed. They’re using the Internet more than 17 hours per week, and more than half that time is spent on sites written in Spanish. In fact, U.S. Hispanics now spend more time online than they do watching television.

According to a 2006 Interactive Advertising Bureau study, U.S. Hispanics are slightly younger, better educated, and more tech-savvy than non-Hispanic respondents.

Roughly half of U.S. Hispanics speak Spanish fluently, and roughly half of Latino adults (7.1 million) prefer Spanish language sites.

Read the article to find out why the market is so desirable for search engine marketers.

Wolf21 has developed a local directory for small businesses wanting to gain visibility on the internet for their keyword terms without the time delay in building a new website.

Not just another directory, Sesimi, promotes your individual products and services on Google, Yahoo and MSN without showing a list of your competitors. In other words, search engine users do not have to search for a service/product and then search again through a directory (and your competitors) to find you.

Webmaster World reports that Yahoo’s site explorer tool may rank the links by a quality measure. You might disagree but site explorer is a handy tool to check your inbound links.

Google Webmaster Central Blog announced the addition of a new form to report paid links. Matt Cutts explains Google’s attitude towards paid links in an April 2007 blog entry; Sign in to Google’s webmaster console and use the spam report form. Add the term “paidlink” in the text area.

Learn more about link building and getting trusted links in this great article from Search Engine Watch.

Watch Search Engine Roundtable ’s video of Google Universal Search for the a great review of the latest changes at Google. The video describes the differences in the new Google including several navigational changes, new results look and Google’s shift to CSS.

Read our latest article on our top 7 tips to drive traffic to your website.

Here is an easy check to see who you are linking to. Go to http://www.live.com and type this command into the search box:
linkfromdomain:yoursite.com.

If you are checking on your competitors to see if they are using a reipricol link try this command
linkfromdomain:yoursite.com site:othersite.com