The Federal Government has announced it will proceed with controversial plans to censor the internet after Government-commissioned trials found filtering a blacklist of banned sites was accurate and would not slow down the internet.

Legislation to enable mandatory censorship legislation will hit Parliament next month. The blacklist, featuring material such as child sex abuse, sexual violence and instructions on crime, would be compiled using a public complaints mechanism, Government censors and URLs provided by international agencies.

An earlier version of the Government's top-secret list of banned sites was leaked on to the web in March, revealing the scope of the filtering could extend significantly beyond child porn.

This article relates back to the hotly debated topic, that of where advertising time and dollars is best spent in today’s increasing digital realm. The simple fact is Google.com is ranked as the number one website in the world according to Alexia.com, with an average of 10 pageviews/user on a daily basis [1].

This information does more then just suggest that Internet users are utilising search engines, it shows that they are using them regularly, with the average user ‘Googling’ something 10 times a day.

On average, our clients who utilise our services for search engine optimisation (SEO) see 450 unique visitors to their site each month. If you have a 5% success ratio (equivelent to print campaigns) in converting those views into clients, that means approximately 23 new clients each month. What is that worth to your business?

Research has shown that “searchers scan a search results page from top to bottom and left to right”. This means that appearing at the top of a search results page means that you are more likely to be seen, and consequently visited by searchers.