Aaron Wall likens SEOer to those who worked in coal, oil or railroads during years past. The reason: connecting supply and demand. While this holiday season is likely to go down as one of the worst on record, online sales held up better than the rest of the retail market. And search is driving much of the growth in online sales. As foot traffic slowed in brick-and-mortar retail stores, consumers continued to click the "buy" button at select online retailers that seem to know the value of SEO. Tapping into a global economy is the biggest advantage of …

Hackers are using a combination of SEO and redirects on microsoft.com and irs.gov to install viruses on computers, according to Mark Williams, who summarizes a post from Gary Warner's blog to provide an example. Williams warns consumers that some links are being used to redirect consumers to pages not created either by Microsoft or the government agency. These pages automatically attempt to load a virus onto the person's computer. "The final step is to use inbound links to insure that the URL pops up high in the search engine," Williams writes. "The criminal will write articles on various …

Mark Rollins reminds us search engines will continue to get smarter, adding services that collect data about consumers' surfing habits. SEO practices will encompass more than just the right keyword phrases and inbound links, but will also tie into social data, testimonials, feedback, reviews, and product comparisons. SEO will also move toward "visual identification," according to Rollins. Aside from online videos, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which allows users to scan hard copies of books, letters and documents to post on the Web, will prompt this shift, "as users will want to search for information using images, rather than …

What's the point of having a rank at a search engine for a specific keyword or phrase if it doesn't send relevant traffic or, even worse, sends no traffic at all? So asks Mike Grehan, overjoyed that ranking has outlived its relevance. Grehan has been trying to educate his clients for years. Aside from rankings, he has written about relevance feedback and the role it plays in retrieving information on the Web. "I work with a crack team of data-driven analysts," Grehan writes. "We're focused on providing meaningful information to our clients based on an advanced approach to …

Agencies don't work alone. Clients need to take responsibility for helping agencies succeed, according to Brian Carter. Clients need to trust, collaborate and communicate with their agency reps, as well as work closely to choose clear goals and understand what it takes to create a successful PPC campaign. Carter explains a host of terms and processes, including PPC conversion rates. He suggests the client's Web site must run analytics to tell if the PPC campaign will deliver a decent return on investment. "Given your profit margin, conversion rate, and the estimated average CPC, you can find out ahead …

Rand Fishkin asks the SEO community for help in describing important metrics that you might apply for second and third level domains. The SEOmozBlog group has been playing around with Linkscape, creating new naming conventions for metrics and features that were previously exclusive to Web indexing researchers, information retrieval scientists and search engineers. "Things like mozRank and mozTrust have seemed to work out fairly well so far, but our testers and members have struggled a bit more with mozRank vs. Domain mozRank--one is for a page while the other applies to a domain--and been seriously confused about FQDs …

Have you been paying attention to Microsoft's failed bid for Yahoo -- and other events of 2008? Joseph Tartakoff put together a 10-question quiz to see if you're a Microsoft know-it-all. For your information, several questions have more than one answer. I've included one question to whet your appetite, but no cheating. For example: "In early February, Microsoft shocked Wall Street with an offer for Yahoo. How much was Microsoft's bid initially worth?" The answers are at the end of the quiz.

Getting more from your PPC strategy with less funds and resources will become a priority in 2009. Steve encapsulates a recent study released by Marketing Sherpa that suggests only social network marketing and email marketing will become a larger part of digital marketing plans moving into 2009. Brands will somewhat phase out paid search marketing, or PPC, display advertising, mobile marketing, and other forms of digital advertising. Steve suggests trial and error may continue to support campaign performance and efficiency, but there will be less room for error. "Strategies will need to be more targeted to reduce wasted …

How do bounce rates relate to SEO? There doesn't seem to be a clear-cut answer to this question -- but Mike McDonald clarified the issue by asking "Googlers" Adam Lasnik, Matt Cutts and Avinash Kaushik. Chris Crum introduces these interviews in his post, shedding light on how to define a bounce. The bounce rate of your site might determine where you rank in search engine. If your site's bounce rate is high, you could have lower rankings in the search engines. Lower bounce rates may mean higher rankings. Google Analytics defines a bounce as any visit where the …

Is the long tail dead? Rand Fishkin turns to the SEM/SEO community to ask if long-tail queries are driving the majority of site traffic after calling out attention to a post in the Times Online U.K. Edition. Fishkin explains the long-tail theory has been questioned for years. The online publication reported "The Internet was supposed to bring vast choice for customers, access to obscure and forgotten products - and a fortune for sellers who focused on niche markets. But a study of digital music sales has posed the first big challenge to this 'long tail' theory: more than …