Dear Li’l Engine members and readers,

I am honored to introduce myself as your new content editor and go-to guy for the revamp Li’l engine website and community.

During the next 6 months I will be working with top designers, programmers and writers together to bring you a better browsing experience, more SEM / SEO and internet marketing related news and online tools to help boost your productivity and sales.

Our little website is now into its 7^th year, during this period we have evolved and grown alongside the SEM and internet marketing industry, which has now grown into a 23 billion dollar monster.

“They say a year in the Internet business is like a dog year.. equivalent to seven years in a regular person’s life. In other words, it’s evolving fast and faster.”
- Vint Cerf

As we start the 3 quarter of 2009 and well into the global financial crisis, the SEM industry continues to grow steadily as more corporations and business see SEM as a cheaper and more effective way of advertising.

While a major new player in the internet advertising market is breaking out and making businesses and marketers take notice. I am speaking of course about Social Media Marketing.

Lets take a look at some quick stats;

What is interesting from this graph when comparing SEO and Social Media Marketing is that only 8% of marketers counted SEO as not relevant / don’t know, where as 27% answered the same for Social Media Marketing.

This is great news for SEO’s as the market is now almost completely aware of the benefit of SEO, but the stat also introduces an uneducated / uncertain market for Social Media Marketing, perhaps where SEO was 7 years ago, what does this mean?

It means there is potential to convert the 27% of marketers who either don’t know about social media marketing or don’t care into the same 8% for SEO!

I see Social Media Marketing as a great potential for internet marketers in the next 2 – 3 quarters, but to achieve great results we must educate ourselves, the public and in particular the business owners / corporations to the benefits Social Media Marketing and most importantly how it alongside SEO and other internet marketing strategies will combine to generate more business and ultimately increase the bottom-line, more sales and revenue.

The goal of the new Lil Engine website is to continue to bring our readers the most up to date information on SEO and SEM but also to focus on new emerging strategies that are going to shape the future of internet marketing.

Updates you will see on Lil Engine in the last 2 quarters of 2009

All about our readers

Who should read our blog and join our discussion forums?

SEO’s.

Whether you are a seasoned SEO looking for the latest search engine trends or a novice SEO, Li’l Engine will give you the in-depth insight along with clear explanations.

Web designers.

O’dear, I’ve gone and said the D word… Truth be told there are many capable web designers out there that are interested in SEO and internet marketing. Why? Because it is an added value to their clients and employers, designers that can provide a stylish, search engine friendly and conversion driven websites are hard to find, but are desperately needed within the industry.

Marketers.

Are you still wondering what all the fuss is about with internet marketing? Consider my post above, internet advertising is worth $23 billion dollars and growing, can you afford not to educate yourself?

Business Owners.

A little knowledge goes a very long way, next time you are approached by an SEO company, you will be armed with a certain amount of knowledge that will help you judge the competency of the SEO and you might just save yourself some $$$ at the same time! Those that are a little adventurous and curious can also try out some of our strategies themselves, the discussion forum will be a great place to network with other business owners and to get advice from seasoned SEO’s.

All about me

My name is John Chen, a creative director and accounts manager for a large E-business firm in Brisbane, Australia. My day to day duties include web design, following up on SEO campaigns, traffic and conversion ROI analysis and speaking with my clients whom are generally small to medium business owners.

My background in internet marketing begun by way of fire, a start-up eshop for consumer electronics, I had knowledge in web and graphic design but little knowledge in internet marketing.
It was a steep learning curve to find out why my website wasn’t making any sales, but luckily for me, I had 2 great mentors that were prepared to answer my dumb questions and always pointed me in the right direction. They were Napoleon Pham from evrsoft and Dejan Petrovic from DejanSEO.

But I realize not everybody is as privileged to have access to mentors, this is one of the major motivations that I decided to take on the role as the new editor of Li’l Engine, to help build a community where experts and novices may share and learn.

I am very much looking forward to bringing about the changes in Li’l Engine outlined above as well as chatting and participating in discussions with you on our blog and forum.

In the mean time, please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions for me or just want to say hi, I would love to hear from some of our regular readers. Alternatively if you want to contact me directly, I can be reached on info [at] johnchen.com.au .

To start following the progress of our development on twitter @little_engine head to

http://twitter.com/little_engine

- John

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While the world’s economies reel and Wall Street struggles to keep afloat, how will the online world be affected? Whether you’re a pro-blogger, an Internet marketer, or an online retailer, the state of e-commerce is an important barometer (more purchases means more ad spending, and more profit for everyone). Knowing this, E-consultancy came out with its Online Shopping and Credit Crunch Survey Report a while back. Surprisingly, the results show that online spending will suffer less than traditional retail. Read the rest of this entry »

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Being a compulsize AdSense checker, I look at my stats almost every hour, and just now I found that I couldn’t log in. Adsense gives me an error “UsernamePasswdNotMatch” in Opera. In fact, they do match, and yes, I’ve checked if caps lock was on and it’s not. On IE8, it gives me an Error 403. I did a quick Twitter search to see if other people were experiencing the same thing, and lo and behold, I wasn’t alone: Read the rest of this entry »

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The UN communications chief has estimated that by the end of 2008, 61% of the world’s population will be using mobile phones – an equivalent of about 4 billion people. Thanks to low cost, better infrastructure, and the human need to connect, mobile phones outnumber personal computers by a mile. We don’t only use them to call, we also text, take photos, play music, watch videos, and even access the Internet – albeit crudely. Several tech evangelists have predicted that the mobile web will be the next great frontier, but as industry players know, that’s easier said than done. Read the rest of this entry »

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After Yahoo! signed the controversial advertising deal with Google a few months ago, some critics denounced the company for virtually hanging the glove and giving the online advertising monopoly to Google. However, with the recent launch of Yahoo!’s new advertising platform called APT, Jerry Yang & Co. seem to be keen on proving the naysayers wrong. Read the rest of this entry »

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Google never ceases to amaze the webmaster community. The newest controversy involving the most popular search engine started when the team at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an article about dynamic URL rewrites:

One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) “search engines can’t cope with these.” Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren’t a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs.

After several explanations on the subject, they drew these conclusions:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.

(…) Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL.

And this was when the problems began. Reactions among webmasters, SEOs, programmers and Internet marketers have been varied, but most of them can be summarised in the following points:

• Some people say there’s nothing wrong about Google team’s statements. For an experienced webmaster or programmer this whole URL rewriting matter can look irrelevant. But for a beginner it would be wiser not to play with URL rewrites indeed, because they could do something wrong, thus affecting their Google rankings.
• Others have gotten annoyed at that article. Some even seem to have taken offense at it. They claim that this time the Google team just put up a bunch of silly stuff and that Google underestimates webmasters. It’s been also implied that Google once again is trying to tell people how they are supposed to run their own businesses.
• Regardless of their views on this subject, everyone seems to agree that Google team’s article looks confusing and poorly-written.

What do you think? Will you stop using dynamic URL rewrites because Google said you probably won’t know how to deal with them?

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If it’s true the the Internet is nothing more than a waste of time, then who else has the most idle hours to kill?

A survey conducted by Ipsos Mendelsohn between March to July of this year revealed that the higher a person’s household income is, the more likely he is to spend his time online. Additionally, the Internet is by far the most preferred media by the rich, with television and radio coming trailing far behind. Read the rest of this entry »

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The famous “Google duplicate content penalty” is a permanent subject of debate among webmasters, bloggers, SEOs and the general Internet marketing community. No wonder the official Google Webmaster Central Blog publishes posts on this topic from time to time. A new one has been recently released and apparently it was meant to put an end to this debate. If it will succeed or no, only time will tell, although I have the feeling that it won’t. Read the rest of this entry »

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While online advertising as a whole has been seeing immense growth, its video component has always lagged behind. However, there are signs that this may be changing soon. Recently, video ad company LiveRail released their quarterly report on the state of online video advertising. They predict that industry spending in the US alone will go past the $1 billion mark in 2010. While that’s still a small fraction of the $36 billion total projected online ad spending for that year, it represents a net increase in market share for video. Read the rest of this entry »

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Twitter has recently added the nofollow tag to all links left on the users’ bio field. This change has been the object of much controversy in both the SEO and the Internet marketing industries. Why? Because many suspect Twitter to have succumbed to Google’s pressure.

How did this story begin?

Everything started when David Naylor published a Twitter backlink tip on his blog. That same day, Matt Cutts — yes, you read it right — sent an email and a twit to Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams, regarding Naylor’s post. Read the rest of this entry »

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