Search engine optimization is starting to become a lot like the stock market: some of your investments payoff quickly, some do not ever payoff, and others go great for years and all of a sudden are worthless.

If you find that your search results are not what they used to be it may be because of all the shakes-ups regarding the search engine market. Every search company is trying to differentiate themselves in this crowded market and this is stirring up rankings.

A month or so ago, Microsoft launched Bing which was promised to provide better results than ever before. They also shared with Yahoo meaning webmasters no longer have to optimize their site for Google, Yahoo and MSN (Bing) to ensure they are getting maximum exposure. Now there are just two big dogs, but there is going to be a wrench thrown into the mix.

Google is launching a new search engine named Google Caffeine. Google is doing this in response to Bing and making search results faster and more accurate.

The public can test Caffeine to see where their site ranks or see what the differences are. It is not nearly as large of a change as what Bing was to MSN, but it may have some large implications to your website traffic. One of the improvements will revolve around getting real time data. As news breaks or new content is published it will be added to Caffeine almost immediately.

Search engine optimization

Google and Bing are claiming to focus more on crawling of relevant content and reliable websites. This means more time should be spent on boosting your website's content and making sure the structure of your website is sound. There are a few things your webmaster can do to make sure you are visible to both Google's Caffeine and Bing.

One of the areas that are being de-emphasized is backlinks. Using the old Google and MSN backlinks were king; the more links you had to your website the higher ranking you would receive. This caused a problem in the industry because you could possibly buy your way to the top. While backlinks are still very important, having website content that is relevant is even more important.

Finally, the age of your website is more important. New websites are being penalized and older domains are being rewarded. There is really nothing you can do about this aspect, just make sure to register new domains as early as possible and do not switch domain names if you can avoid it.