With the ever evolving internet market for just about anything you can imagine andGoogle's index growing to almost 9 billion pages, and counting, there is littledispute amongst search engine optimizers that our job is getting much harder.From linking to articles, and density to ontology, our industry changes as fast asany other. The search engines, especially Google, seem to be on a daily diet ofchange and their algorithm seems to be growing at the rate of their index.

The word 'related' plays a much bigger part in SEO today than it ever has in thepast. Instead of targeting an exact keyword phrase, it now makes a lot more senseto keep your site within context and to have related words to your keywords,compared to having density of one keyword phrase. Linking has also turned into afrenzy for relevancy. Unrelated links seem to no longer carry much weight at all. Thetheme through all of Google's recent changes seems to come down to one cliché:quality over quantity.

Just like with any other update at Google, optimizers must search and research theirprofession, however it seems to be happening more often than ever. You can't walkthrough our office without hearing Google's name a thousand times. We haveunofficial RND (research and development) meetings almost every hour as thereseems to constantly be new ideas and theories popping into all of our heads. In thepast there were always changes to the way we've done our work, but the pace ofthis change is accelerating rapidly as well as the competition for online searchers.

MSN seems to be creating a buzz and they've just recently started a nationaltelevision ad campaign. Their search results resemble Google's of 6 months ago, atime that will go down in SEO history as "the good old days", and also a time thatGoogle's SERPs seemed a lot more relevant than they do today. New search enginesseem to be popping up all over the place, and after all, wasn't Google a virtualunknown 5 years ago?

One of the best points made to me over the past month came at the preview of thenew become.com search engine in California, where founder Michael Yang decreedthis to be only the very beginning in the history of online search. Whatever happensin Google's future, and the future of online search, there is one thing for certain:only the most intelligent and innovative of SEO companies are going to stay abovethe bar and continue to find ways to get their clients, and themselves, to the top.

Bobby Heard (bheard@abalone.ca) is the Vice-President of Abalone Designs ( http://www.abalone.ca), which offers great SEO results at affordable prices.