Over the past few months we've watched the corporate maneuvers in the search engine world heat up into an all out business war. While the war is being fought on several fronts by several search engine firms, the most ferocious fighting is being waged between the two largest and most profitable players, Google and Overture.

Last Friday, Google announced another in a long list of recent acquisitions, the semantic text processing company, Applied Semantics. This purchase, atop several other similar acquisitions offers Google's search engine even stronger search and retrieval capabilities. It has also positioned Google in such an advantageous position in relation to Overture that the price of Overture stock was driven down by almost 27% on the news, closing yesterday at just above $11/share (formerly $16.47).

The purchase of Applied Semantics offers Google a sizable partner, one that used to be one of the ten top search-results distribution partners for Overture. With its Domain Park system that turns good domain names with little or no content into faux-directories, Google has an enormous new distribution market for Adwords listings, a market that was recently served by Overture. Google is clearly sizing the market up for more impressive moves in the future, as is Overture. What remains to be seen are the directions each company will take in the future. The only guarantee is that future will be very interesting for everyone involved.

Industry rumor has it that, contrary to recent public statements, Google is in fact lining up an IPO in the near future. This is probably the most anticipated news item that may never happen in the history of the search engine industry. Google has coyly refused to commit to issuing stock in the company for years while quietly floating trial balloons and allowing speculation that they might. This week the company hired former Credit Suisse First Boston analyst Lise Buyer. Ms. Buyer had left CSFB before the round of scandals and has been praised in the media for her misgivings about technology stocks back in early 2000. Google also said it recently opened an east coast engineering office in New York City, clearly signaling the company’s aggressive plans for growth. The Google press release even referred to its listing of current job openings.

By hiring Ms. Buyer, aggressively positioning itself to take on its biggest rival, Overture, and opening new regional offices, Google is demonstrating its intentions to grow rapidly. Speculation about an IPO has heated up recently in the SEO discussion communities as well. Remember years back when our parents should have bought Xerox or we should have bought into Yahoo?

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Keywords are the words search engine users might enter in a search engine text box when looking for a information about a specific topic. More often than not, search engine users will type in a two-keyword phrase such as "search positioning" or "used cars". Choosing the keyword phrases you want your website to be found under will be critical to the success of any search engine promotion you will undertake. When making keyword recommendations, StepForth examines several factors.

Our first question is, "What words are most often used by search engine users?" To find out, we check a number of sources including Overture's Keyword Suggestion Tool, word tracking software, and the various search engines themselves.

Next we examine the text content of the website to determine how much modification, if any, will be required to target the keyword phrases we think will work best for our clients. It is important to aim for the most powerful keyword phrases but these phrases must be relevant to the information found on the website.

Lastly, we try to get a good sense of the competition for a specific keyword phrase. Primarily, we do that in three ways. First we check the number of sites associated with a particular keyword phrase by typing that phrase into the text boxes at Google, AlltheWeb and Lycos. The number of sites associated with that keyword phrase will generally appear in the upper right hand corner of the results window. The second method of determining the competitiveness of each phrase is based on the professionalism we perceive in competing websites. If a specific set of keyword phrases produces websites that have obviously had a great deal of time and commitment thrown into them, we have a pretty good idea that the phrase is taken seriously by people in the sector. The third way of judging the competitiveness of a keyword phrase is to visit Overture and see how much other companies are willing to bid per click for visits under that phrase. Obviously, the more they are willing to bid, the higher the competitiveness of that phrase is judged.