Search Engine Optimization - Should you bother?

The Search Engine Optimization industry started off as a cottage industry with entrepreneurs working from their bedrooms at night. Now it's become a full-fledged, multi-million dollar online marketing services discipline consisting of thousands of small to large companies.

The quality of SEO services has improved as the industry matures. Yet even now, it's still hard to discern the ethical from the charlatan, the hype from the mundane.

This is an industry where technicians appear to practice black magic, and some will take advantage of the mystique. Search engines provide a promotional tool that is technical and complex, thus SEO techniques are commonly misunderstood.

The Black Magic of SEO

Search engines and directories are the most widely used means of finding information on the Internet. These sites also get a lot of traffic. Search engines provide two advertising vehicles: keyword ad buys and search engine text links. Up till now, search engine text links have remained mostly unsponsored because of ethical concerns. But the landscape is changing, as search engines begin to monetize text links by allowing them to be sponsored.

Keyword Ad Buys. When you type in the keyword "books" on a search engine like Yahoo!, up pops an ad for Barnes & Noble. This is a rather expensive ad because it's so highly targeted. Keyword inventory commands premium CPM of $35, $45 and $60. Such a campaign can cost $35,000 per month and up.

Search Engine Text Links. For this same keyword, you'll get text listings for book sites: You'll see 16,726 sites on Yahoo! and 27.6 million on Google. Most people only look through the first 10 or 20 listings (two pages).

If users are searching for the key phrases relevant to a particular online business offering, they might click to that site. So there's an incentive for marketers to be found on page one of the result pages on the major engines and directories such as Yahoo!, LookSmart, Alta Vista, HotBot, Lycos, and so on.

These engines and directories are delivering qualified user groups to Web sites. If you're an e-commerce site, the chances are that you contracted out or self-submitted your site to search engines and directories—right? Then you found out that you didn't get listed or positioned in the engines and directories you wanted the most.

This is where a good SEO company can step in to seed those search engine links, delivering the qualified users you want to attract. Such a campaign can cost $500 to $5,000 per month

In this series of three articles, I will cover three introductory topics, such as why SEO is important, the basics of getting listed, and the many options for getting listed, including doing it yourself.

Why Is SEO Important?

Most users will find you through search engines and directories. It's been proven time and again in research studies, but the strongest evidence seems to come from the number of unique visitors shown for search engines in the Media Metrix U.S. Top 50 Web and Digital Media Properties.

The summary below is compiled from Media Metrix's Top 50 report. This identifies a few of the search engines measured in that report and shows their traffic numbers, in millions of unique visitors, from December 1 to December 31, 2000.

Media Property - Unique visitors in millions
AOL Network    - 60.562
Yahoo!            - 54.626
Microsoft Sites - 53.809
Excite Network - 30.819
Lycos             - 29.965
Alta Vista        - 18.718
NBC Sites        - 15.921
Look Smart      - 13.647
Ask Jeeves      - 11.853
iWon              - 8.915
Google           - 7.386

This is nearly 300 million unique visitors in one month alone. Not all of them were searching for Web sites, as some were looking for stock quotes or weather reports. Nonetheless, research indicates that a substantial amount of traffic comes from search engines, as shown in the studies highlighted below from the year 2000.

More than 75 percent of surfers use search engines to traverse the Web, according to a RealNames Survey.

An IMT Strategies research study indicated that 45.8 percent of Web users cited search engines as their top choice for finding Web sites.

Every day, 57 percent of all Netizens use a search engine, making searching the second most popular Internet activity.

The only thing we do online more often than using search engines is check our email, according to a study by Statistical Research, Inc.

The final Graphics, Visualization & Usability (GVU) Center User Survey reported that 84.8 percent of respondents found out about Web pages from search engines.

Iconocast reported that 81 percent of U.K. users find Web sites through search engines (Source: June 2000, Forrester Research Inc., "UK Internet User Monitor.")

In January 2000, Media Metrix reported the top 10 search engines had nearly 147 million unique visitors each month, a number that jumps more than 10 percent every month.

What’s the Value of SEO?

An unsponsored search engine text link found on page one has titles and descriptions targeted to the exact key phrase being searched by the user. This brings you quality, targeted traffic. Being found on page one significantly helps in providing you the visibility and opportunity of capturing your most qualified traffic.

SEO marketing has been a sleeper in the online advertising industry. Savvy media planners have recently recognized its value as a cost-effective, integral component of their online marketing campaign strategies. Although the cost benefits prove attractive, search engine optimization is a trial and error process, one that can be tedious but also rewarding.

Next month I’ll shine the light on the basic elements of a successful SEO campaign. It all boils down to optimization, submission, registration and monitoring.
April 2, 2001