It's becoming more and more a trend amoung SEO's to hear Danny Sullivan's keynote address at the SES conferences. Many wait with baited breathe to hear his state of the industry as well they should. His accounting of the SEO/SEM industry is truly an edge of your seat experience.

Thanks to Rustybrick for organizing the article by Mike Grehan in the latest news to come from search engine watch.

Paid Inclusion Turnaround:
- Every one was doing Paid Inclusion except Google
- Now it is just Yahoo and they still are doing it
- Yellow Pages, Audio/Visual and Shopping also offer PFI
- In vertical searches, Danny believes that paid inclusion will stick around but not in other areas.

Lawsuites:
- Trademark issue is still unresolved; Google is in court now about this.
- Even the meta tag law suit is coming back
- Click-fraud is a rising concern, even Google says it is
- Censorship, copyright, and so on. The industry is still growing and maturing.

Personal Search Arrives:
- Eurekster started
- But how's that search

Getting Personal
- Personal generally meant results reshaped by what you clicked on
- Eurekster joined forces with Friendster, that will be interesting
- Also there is Search Memory, Search History

Surviving Personal Search
- Great Content
- Great title tags and descriptions
- Grassroots? watching and seeing, multiple fronts will open

Google Dance Syndrome
- Last year's Florida largely hasn't repeated but everything is in the sandbox
- The dance is gone
- Will no doubt continue to have shifts in results

Share of US Searches
- Google has shrunk to 45%, Yahoo has grown to 32%, MSN has 15% (they will use their own soon), Ask jumped to 6% and other accounts for 3%.

Shortcuts & Direct Display
- Invisible tabs moving forward, with introduction or expansion of "detours" or "shortcuts" (AOL Snapshots, Ask Smart Search, Google OneBox Results, Yahoo Shortcuts)
- Web results wont be the only and premier item on the results page, how often do you see Google News, Yellow Pages, Froogle, Definitions at the top. The other day, I saw Google Books.

Surviving Shortcuts
- Watch the verticals
- Focus on the ones getting promoted
- Learn, prepare, aim to do well in those.

Battle of the Desktop
- October: Google Desktop Comes out
- Yesterday: MSN
- Tomorrow: Ask
- Jan: Yahoo
- AOL Beta

Desktop Search Impact on SEM
- They see you again and again and again
- Can you measure this impact on the bottom line?

SEM Firms Channel Money
- SEM Firms handle 1.3 billion - 50% of est. 2004 spending on paid search (jupiter research)
- Search advertising overall recognized as a major industry, especially "media owners"
- SEM firms now should get same recognition aren't a "Cottage industry
- Danny says Google is a Media company, I heard Google say they do not want to be thought of a media company but rather a technology company. Danny says no, you are a media company.

Evolution of Firms
- SEMPO says 74% firms flat fee based
- Jupiter says 50% flat-fee based
- But what about non paid because SEM firms do both (sempo says)

SEO is Huge - At Least to Firms
- SEO = PR; Search Ads = Ads; SEO + Ads = SEM
- Outsourced SEM is $380 million (9% of total $4.1 billion industry in 2004 est - sempo)
- Money they keep from running paid or organic (47% from SEO, 43% from paid search)
- He showed some more SEMPO statistics from last nights data

Search Not Paid Search
- Have to understand search is not paid search
- Failure to do so means
- possible misreading of where SEM firms will go
- upsetting firms but not providing support needed on the non paid side

What's Needed
- Algorithmic warnings
- etc. same slide from San Jose Keynote

Article can be found here

Search Engine Optimization Blog Article...