Personally, I think the perceived value is both SEO and hot air. With most of the success being had proving to be SEO however, I guess it is safe to say there is a future in that sector of Web business.

Type the term “search-engine marketing” into a Google box and you’ll find a list of businesses that specialize in improving their customers’ positioning in search results. Now type the same term into a Yahoo search box, and you’ll get some different companies, in a different order.

Try the same exercise tomorrow and you’ll find yet another variation.

Part science, part art, search-engine marketing is perhaps the fastest-evolving segment of the Internet. A cottage industry of search-marketing techies labors to adjust keywords to a search engine’s algorithm, the set of rules used to rank search results. The algorithm used by Google, the market leader, has hundreds to thousands of components that determine the results. Source: HotelMarketing.com

[tags]marketing,algorithm,search engines,yahoo search,cottage industry[/tags]