We have seen in the past few years Bing growing leaps and bounds in the search market. However, the growth really isn’t coming from Google’s market share, though it has nibbled some away. Instead Bing is growing because it is cannibalizing its partner Yahoo!

Growth is growth though, and Bing is becoming a significant player in the search industry. As a search marketer this is obviously very important to me. I personally don’t care how my users find my website (Google, Bing, or their mother), just that they do find it.

According to Google’s Annual Stock Holder Report, 99% of all its revenues come from their advertising programs (and not the 97% usually reported). For a company which almost did 35 billion dollars in revenue last year, that’s rather impressive.

As Google’s advertising flagship, Adwords is the bulk of that cash flow. The creative people at Wordstream did an infographic on the 20 most expensive keywords in Google AdWords. I was curious to see what it would cost if SEO was treated like Adwords. Meaning, what we would have to pay Google if they charged us per click for every #1 organic position we held in their search engine.

Doing this exercise puts in to perspective the importance of ranking organically over paid. There is no doubt that paid has a place in a search marketing strategy, but for many users the instant fix of paid search heavily over shadows the long run benefits of SEO.

Note: My wife was rather concerned when I showed her the title of this post. I put her at ease by sharing that this article does not focus on anything that would make her, my mother, or the Pope’s grandmother feel uncomfortable.

At the end of this post is an updated video from an older video that has been circulating, in one form or another, around YouTube for the past several years. If you go to the 37th second of the video you will see the statement, “Social Media has overtaken pornography as the #1 activity on the web.” This statement was provided in the original video (though, with a little variation in wording), but for some reason the importance of it didn’t catch my attention until now.

I decided to do some digging on the validity of this statement and found that the source comes from a September 16, 2008 Reuters article titled, “Porn passed over as Web users become social.” The article shows a study done by Bill Tancer, the general manager of global research at Hitwise (a well respected web tracking company). Tancer analyzed information from over 10 million web users to conclude that indeed the normal Internet user is choosing social media over online pornography.

12/30/2010 UPDATE: My good friend Tyler sent me over a more in depth case study on the LDS Church’s SEO efforts. It comes from a U.K. Web Development firm, and the author breaks down the Mormon Church’s strong points in SEO. Very interesting read!

Josh Spaulding wrote a fantastic article about whether or not you should build backlinks to your article directory articles (let’s just call these articles, AD Articles). His answer:

“The answer to the question is 98% of the time, no. And 2% of the time, yes.”

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Back in January my long time friend, Eric Proffitt, called me and said he had a crazy idea he wanted to share with me. First, though, before I share his idea I have to give a little background on Eric.

I’ve know Eric for 13 years and ever since I’ve known him he has sang like a well tuned canary. He has one of the most amazing voices. The last few years Eric has really pushed his talent to be the voice against human trafficking. He even sang and did a program for the United Nations last year, which highlighted the serious issue of modern-day slavery.