Its the classic chicken or egg mystery. What came first, the search engine rankings or the organic traffic? Does it really matter?, you ask. It does when you are performing a balancing act between the strict SEO who is concerned only the rankings and the traffic hungry client who demands the direct correlation to their bottom line.

It its not trackable from a traffic perspective is it worthwhile? Search engine rankings can certainly come without traffic. If the SEO does a poor job targeting the appropriate keywords, than it doesn’t matter if you are ranked number one. You’re not driving any traffic because no one is searching on those terms. On the other hand, if an SEO is able to obtain good search engine positioning on strategic keywords, the organic traffic will come in droves. Once the highly sought after rankings on Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK are achieved the benefits are reaped for years to come. These desired results, however, take time and it is virtually impossible to equate one thing or another to the reason for success. SEO is a sum of its parts and always evolving with the social trends of the Internet. Find an SEO you can trust with references and then give them some breathing room. They will get you the rankings eventually, which will be followed by the traffic. And always remember, long after you have paid for their services, that traffic is still in rush hour.

That’s right search engineS, plural. Wikia, Inc. the new open source search engine will allow anyone and everyone to create there own search engine for free. Google should be terrified. Check out the below article from Washingtonpost.com:

Google Faces More Than Just a New Rival in Wikia
PC World
Saturday, August 11, 2007; 12:19 AM

Google Inc. and other search engines face far more than just a new rival in Wikia Inc., they face the prospect of hundreds, even thousands of new competitors.

The entire search engine project Wikia is working on will enter the open source domain, drastically reducing the cost for just about anyone to make a search engine, said Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia Inc. Instead of paying millions of dollars to index the Web, create the software to build a search page, a filter for empty or spam pages, and an algorithm to calculate and rank findings, new search companies will find these items free online thanks to the open source and free software communities.

“In search, it still costs about US$5 million to $10 million to build a site,” said Penchina during an interview in Taipei. “We want to make it possible for anyone to build a search site for $500. We don’t view Google as the competition, we view cost as the competition.”

The project, which was started by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, consists of four components, the indexing of the Web, developing a search engine application, an algorithm, and using people to help filter sites and rank results.

One of the most expensive components of a search engine is the effort needed to index the Web. Companies have to buy servers and software to crawl the Web looking at what’s on every page, in order to create a comprehensive list of what’s on the Web.

Finish article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/11/AR2007081100025.html)