Think about an organization with deep pockets, with proselitism as its raison d‘être and with a target audience as wide as the Mankind. No, it’s not X-Factor or the UEFA,  it is the Catholic Church and its management, the Holy See. I will be on it soon.

I am reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Laclos, these days, partly because I was looking for any novel in French at home. There are a few Internet users in the US that read books. That is newsworthy surely but the killer statistic is that 20% have at least read an e-book already. Never mind, I will be a late adopter. I am looking forward to the coming war between the Sony, Apple and Amazon. It will push forward the technology, its features and its costs.

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Rupert Murdoch claimed that Mountain View redirects users from Google to the BBC web site: “The BBC has been paying US internet search engine Google for the right to use key words and phrases that put it on top of results lists. [...] The BBC paid Google so that people looking up details of the Mercury Prize, for instance, would be directed to a BBC website“. Is this SEO or SEM?

To put the claim in context, News Corp is embarked in a number of skirmishes against BBC for a share of the publicity market on TV in the UK and against Google to monetize the content of news site.

The news could be read as an entirely legitimate purchase of Adwords by the BBC. It is unclear whether paying to put the BBC on top of results for certain keywords is referring to any sort of SEO self-inflicting practice against Google’s own Terms of Service.

I carried out a quick research and the results suggest that SEM is not part of the BBC tactics:

1. The BBC is not buying the kws mentioned in the article, eg. Speech Debelle and Mercury Prize

2. The BBC is a notorious pinch-penny in Adwords spending.

The most plausible explanation is however that the piece of news was written by a journalist that either does not have a clue about the permanent tension between SEO and SEM, or that he/she knew all too well.

The quality and interest of a web site has no correlation to whether it is optimised for search engines or not. Some of the best sites I visited recently have a very poor SEO (Search Engine Optimization). One of them is Lucy Moose’s stuffyourdoodles.com. Is is an e-commerce site of handmade stuffed figures made to look exactly like children’s drawings.

The site has testimonials with feedback that most of businesses can only dream about. Clients write about how impressed they are with their stuffed textiles.

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