It has been reported in the last couple of days that there has been an increase of teenagers trying to hack into websites and to collect credit card details.  It has been said that the teenagers have been exchanging ready made hacking and phishing kits in online forums as well as credit card numbers and have been using basic search engine optimisation skills to.

Most of the malware that these teenagers have been producing is used to try and gather data from social bookmarking and networking websites like Myspace, Facebook and StumbleUpon.  The teenagers then tend to move into making phishing software in order to try and create their own scams to make money.  The only problem the teenagers have been facing is that most of their programming skills are really bad, making it easy to find out where the virus have come from and to put a stop to them.   It is a shame that these teenagers are using SEO to try and make money by breaking the law when they would probably stand a better chance using their SEO skills to make money from online advertising and affiliate deals. 

Mobile phones, love them or hate them they have become a permanent fixture in our everyday lives.  The technology has evolved so much now that rather than being just a phone your mobile is your camera, diary and more.   Using your mobile to browse the Internet started with WAP and then advance to 2.5G and then 3G.  While using the Internet on your mobile isn’t perfect it is a growing market with a lot of potential.  Surely this is the next market that is going to be a battle ground for Google and the other search engines as well as search engine optimisation gurus and Internet marketing experts.

The .mobi market is already growing with domain names like flowers.mobi, sportsbook.mobi and fun.mobi being sold for between $100,000 and $200,000.  This is proof that businesses are looking at this next part of the web expansion, especially as there are 1 billion Internet users and 2 billion mobile phone users.  This is a market that will need to be jumped on by web design companies dealing with search engine optimisation as their clients will soon want part of this growing market.      

We all know that to make the most of your search engine optimisation you need to combine it with other forms of marketing both online and offline.  Proof of this can be seen simply by visiting Google.  You will often find that some companies appear in both the organic listings and the sponsored links and there is a very good reason for this.  People react differently to things online, where some people may not trust the sponsored links and only use the organic listings some people may just use the sponsored links.

Royal Mail recently conducted a survey among consumers to find out how they react to direct mail.  Their findings suggested that direct mail can boost marketing campaigns when they are combined with SEO.  The reason for this is because the more a consumer sees a product or brand in different areas of their life the more they begin to trust it.  This is vital for major brands with huge marketing budgets which is why they are everywhere but this might not be the case for small to medium sized businesses that have to be more strategic with their marketing budget.  The best solution is to ensure you have a good search engine optimisation and PPC campaign, as people tend to search online to find out about companies and products and then to fit in offline marketing where possible.