About
Search
Engine
Placement,
Optimization,
&
Marketing
"Over
Umpteen
Zillions
Served"
 Those
of
us
of
a
certain
age
remember
the
days
when
McDonald's
franchises
used
to
have
replaceable
plastic
reader
board
numbers
below
their
golden
arches
outside,
so
they
could
change
the
count
whenever
the
McDonald's
worldwide
burger
juggernaut
passed
"Over
100
Million
Served"
or
"Over
500
Million
Served".
As
a
child,
it
was
always
fun
to
see
each
new
milestone
reached,
but
McDonald's
grew
like
kudzu
through
the
last
decades
of
the
20th
century
and
they
eventually
threw
up
their
hands,
lost
the
reader
board
numbers,
and
settled
on
a
more
or
less
permanent
"Billions
and
Billions
Served".
The
Web
threw
up
its
hands
and
put
away
its
reader
board
numbers
a
long
time
ago.
McDonald's
rate
of
growth
seems
glacial
compared
to
the
proliferation
of
the
Web.
For
example,
- In
September
2006,
over
1.086
billion
of
the
world's
inhabitants
used
the
Internet
last
year,
compared
to
248
million
in
December
1999,
and
just
16
million
in
December
1995.
- In
one
randomly-audited
24-hour
period
in
October
2006,
roughly
2.2
million
new
domains
were
registered.-1
(That's
almost
as
many
stores
as
Starbucks
opened
during
the
same
period.
Okay,
maybe
a
few
more,
but
not
by
much).
- Though
it
might
be
easier
just
to
assume
"billions
and
billions"
served
and
leave
it
at
that,
the
most
reliable
estimates
suggest
that
there
are
roughly
17.1
billion
pages
on
the
Web,
with
10
million
new,
static
pages
being
added
daily.
The
numbers
are,
quite
frankly,
mind-boggling.
We
could,
in
our
lifetime,
see
the
official
adoption
of
the
amount
"bajillion"
to
describe
the
uncountable
number
of
Web
pages
fast
rivalling
or
threatening
to
exceed
the
number
of
stars
in
the
solar
system.
That
kind
of
head-spinning
data
can
be
more
than
a
bit
discouraging
to
someone
just
hanging
out
their
Internet
shingle
and
wanting
the
world
to
find
them
right
away.
It's
been
out
of
this
need
that
Search
Engine
Optimization
was
born,
and
later,
its
offshoot,
Paid
Placement.
And
what's
the
difference
between
the
two?
Well...
- http://www.domaintools.com/Internet-statistics/
- http://www.allaboutmarketresearch.com/Internet.htm
-
http://www.metamend.com/Internet-growth.html
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"WHEN
I
WAS
A
BOY...
"
A
Tale
from
The
Olden
Days
of
SEO
Way
back
in
1998,
I
was
working
at
a
dot-com
and
experimenting
with
SEO
for
our
company
site.
With
a
few
tweaks
of
keyword
placement,
the
META
tags,
and
a
few
different
on-page
factors,
I
uploaded
the
pages,
resubmitted
the
sites
to
Infoseek
(now
go.com,
a
portal
site
owned
by
the
Disney
Company),
waited
seven
or
eight
minutes
and
started
entering
the
search
times
I'd
optimized
the
pages
for
"Web
design
company
oregon",
"search
placement
specialists",
etc.
One
after
the
other,
they
showed
up
#1,
#3,
#1,
#4,
and
so
on,
from
complete
search
index
oblivion
just
ten
minutes
earlier.
Years
ago,
I
read
a
book
about
the
early
days
of
Washington
DC,
before
World
War
II,
and
an
anecdote
about
a
man
driving
along
Pennsylvania
Avenue
in
1926
in
a
convertible
when
it
began
to
rain.
He
pulled
off
the
road,
into
the
driveway
at
1600
Pennsylvania,
under
the
portico,
pulled
up
the
roof
on
his
convertible,
and
was
on
his
way.
What
do
these
stories
have
in
common?
They
both
seem
equal
parts
quaint,
implausible
and
even
absurd,
and
reminiscent
of
a
naively
simple
time
that
is
long,
long
gone
to
history
and
difficult
to
believe
ever
really
existed
at
all. | |
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