When it comes to search engine popularity in the U.S., the rankings usually come out to be:

1. Google
2. Yahoo
3. MSN

There are a lot of people who call them social media consultants or even social media experts in the online marketing field these days - and some of them even have real online marketing expertise!  However, when working with social media consultants or SEO consultants with social media credentials, it is essential to recognize that it takes more than having a couple hundred or even a few thousand Facebook friends or Twitter followers to understand how social media actually works.

With apologies to Aaron Wall, everyone’s got a friend’s cousin’s brother who has read SEOBook and thinks that this makes him an online marketing expert.  Now, while SEOBook is certainly a valuable resource and a great place for beginners to start, that bit of research alone is not going to teach you what works on the web - understanding how the search engines and how to get a website to rank for popular keywords requires more than just a little reading.

The perfect title tag is the foundation of your search engine optimization process.  After all, it is the first thing your users see in the search results as well as one of the major components that show the search engines what your site is all about.

As always, here are our SEO company’s favorite articles and blog posts this week:

Marketing Pilgrim covers the latest announcement from Google, Yahoo, and MSN, the new canonical URL tag.

Many SEO companies look down on pay-per-click marketing - at best, it is considered the poor cousin of search engine optimization.  However, pay-per-click has its uses: it is a great way to establish some initial brand equity and get some traffic when you have a brand new site, and it can be a valuable way to determine the opportunities that a particular market holds.

As several other online marketing bloggers have already pointed out, John Dvorak of PC Mag is not a big fan of SEO companies. 

If your website is not on page #1 of the search results, it might as well be nowhere.  Since 90% of users click on a listing on page one when they search, and 62% click on a listing in the top three, if your site is not located on the first page of the search results, only 10% of users are ever going to see it.  Furthermore, your page #1 ranking has to be natural - 72% of users only click on the organic results, not the sponsored ads or pay-per-click listings.

Last week, real estate giant Century 21 announced that they were dropping their television advertising entirely, in favor of online advertising and marketing.  Of course, as an SEO company, we are excited to see that major corporations are beginning to realize the full value of online marketing.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Google’s existence - doesn’t it seem like we’ve all been Googling for answers to all our internet questions much longer than that? More importantly, Google has gone from a upstart search engine to perhaps the biggest player on the internet - and as an SEO company, we have a more…adversarial relationship with Google than most.