A crib sheet for search-savvy marketers

Many of you recall John Battelle’s description of Google as “The Database of Intentions” in “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture.”

Battelle thought Google was “sitting on a gold mine of information” due to the billions of queries going through its servers. He was right.

But does Google satisfy intention in a query? Perhaps not quite, since we all need better search results, right? New search technologies are launched each year trying to supplant Google. Commercial search has been growing since 1995, back when I was starting my first search engine positioning work on GlobalSafety.com. Best practices in those days were about installing proper meta data and submitting your site to search engines manually. This was before the term “search engine optimization” was coined, and prior to black hat vs. white hat and paid search advertising entering the search marketing landscape.

The history of search in a nutshell
While Tim Burners-Lee invented the internet in 1989, it was merely a collection of servers for information sharing among academics and government in those days. In 1990, Burners-Lee developed the first web browser and called it the World Wide Web. The browser enabled users to locate web pages and view text and graphics on a page. It was the breakthrough that made the web available to a wide audience of home and business computer users, spawning the commercial aspect of the web.

Even though we had the World Wide Web in the early nineties, it didn’t truly evolve until more advanced browsers like Netscape Navigator (1994) and Microsoft Internet Explorer (1995) were launched. We all know Internet Explorer became the browser of choice because it was bundled with the Microsoft Operating Systems (Windows 95 and 98). However, AOL and Mozilla may get the last laugh as Firefox gains market share over Internet Explorer.

In the early days, the storing and retrieving of files was done by FTP (File Transfer Protocol), a means for exchanging files over the internet. However, the data was not organized, which made it difficult to find anything. That’s when the first search engine, Archie, was born, organizing the files and making them available to users upon a query. Archie answered user queries by searching the FTP sites across the internet, indexing the files and giving users access to its database. As search tools matured, Veronica and Gopher located documents rather than files.

Many search engines and directories were launched between 1994 and 1996, including Yahoo, Open Directory Project (DMOZ), WebCrawler, AltaVista, LookSmart, Lycos, HotBot, Infoseek and Excite. AOL, MSN and Google joined the fray in 1997 and 1998. Besides these major players, there were a number of specialty search engines on the web as well.

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The foundation of modern search marketing
Two major events took place in the late 1990s that laid the groundwork for today’s competitive search marketing environment: the advent of Google PageRank and pay-per-click advertising.

Search took a dramatic shift when Google introduced PageRank in 1998, propelling the new kid on the block on its path to search dominance. The differentiator was the inclusion of authoritative links in the organic algorithm, providing much needed relevance. Users noticed in a hurry, and Google practically became an overnight sensation.

Another bold move in late 1997 was the introduction of pay-per-click advertising on GoTo.com (aka Overture and currently Yahoo Search Marketing).

GoTo got off to a slow start at first, with many search practitioners dismissing its importance. But advertisers and customers loved it. Despite the bad rap of paying for position, it eventually dominated internet marketing.

These two search innovations, linking to authority sites (PageRank) and pay-per-click advertising, were the twin forces that made Google the profitable search/media giant it is today.

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Phases of search development
The evolution of search has been described in terms of binary computer stages and has encompassed a number of dynamic changes over the past 13 years. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan summarized the progression of search in his keynote at SMX-West 2008 as follows.

• Search 1.0: Location and frequency of terms on the page — 1994-1998
• Search 2.0: Off-page factors: PageRank and anchor text — 1998-2008
• Search 3.0: Blended search — 2007-2008
• Search 4.0: Personalized and social search — 2007-2008

Search progress can also be described in terms of algorithm development:

1. Text Phase: Algorithms used the location and frequency of keywords on the page for ranking results. (1994 to 1998).
2. Link Phase: Algorithms focused more on off-page factors due to Google PageRank. Linking and anchor text became important for ranking results. (1998 to present).
3. Social Phase: Algorithms include past history and clickstream data; universal results include vertical databases (2007 to present).
4. Behavior Phase: Algorithms to include user intent (2008 and beyond).

Google’s organic search algorithm uses personalization, blended search and social search to provide search results. It is the only search engine doing all that, even though Ask 3D includes blended search results. Google results are based on history and clickstream data, including your own behavior/clicks, those of people you know, and those of people in aggregate.

The screenshot below shows the effect of including personalization and vertical databases in web search results on a query from my computer for the movie “Zohan.” Besides the website, there are news results, YouTube and blog results. However, the same query would likely provide different search results for others because their web history and clickstream data are different from mine.

Currently, a typical Google search touches some 700 to 1,000 machines in Google’s data centers and can return a list of 5 million results in 0.16 seconds. Google is investing $2 billion each year into its 30 data centers and operates more than 467,000 servers.

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Alternative search technologies
Alternatives to Google have come and gone over the years, but none have yet challenged Google’s popularity. Google itself noted the inadequacy of its content-based filtering system in 2007 by implementing Personalized, Social, and Blended Search. Below is a brief review of a few alternative search technologies.

• Search engines like Quintura and Clusty provide a cluster of results based on tags and keywords. Users view results along with the clusters of relationships in graphic form. This shows how the query is related to other topics, which can be pursued or not.
• Engines like Hakia and Powerset use technologies that apply logic to infer user intent, then they use that knowledge to improve search results. They use natural language processing to understand the meaning behind a user query and personalization to tailor queries to user interests.
• Collarity uses recommendations-based technology to provide search results based partly on content analysis and partly on the recommendations of individuals and groups, calling it Content Search and Discovery. It is focused on improving website monetization through relevant site search results and content recommendations driven by the anonymous behavior of a site’s audience.
• Rollyo was one of the first social search engines allowing users to create their own search engine of trusted sources. This resulted in a searchroll restricted to selected websites that can be shared with other users. Search sites that restrict data sources to provide better search results include A9 and verticals like Retrevo (electronics search engine).
• Mahalo is a human-powered search engine, using guides (editors) to create search results for popular search terms. Users can edit a page on Mahalo if they are registered and logged in, although Mahalo guides check every edit for accuracy. When Mahalo has no page for a search term, it serves results from Google and other engines.
• ChaCha and Wikia also use human editors in an attempt to provide better search results. ChaCha pays human guides to answer questions for mobile users. Ask a question like, “How old is Hillary Clinton?” and it will tell you she’s 60 and was born October 26, 1947. Wikia, on the other hand, generates machine results first, and then teams of volunteer tech enthusiasts filter the sites and rank search results within a community-based model similar to Wikipedia. Since inception in January, Wikia has about 25,000 mini articles and 60,000 edits to the wiki, along with 20,000 registered users. However, Wikia lacks volume, as its database hasn’t had enough time to fully evolve.

There are hundreds of alternative search engines looking for the Holy Grail to better search results. What can be used to meet the demands of modern-day searchers? The latest trend is to put the human touch back into search with a focus on human intent.

User intent can be used in search technology for the benefit of consumers and marketers alike. Recommendations-based search technology may be ideal for tapping into user intent. While most search engines use algorithms based on content filtering technology, collaborative filtering technology can be used to make recommendations based partly on content analysis and partly on the recommendations of a person or group.
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Content filtering vs. collaborative filtering
Search engines currently use two types of search technology: content filtering and collaborative filtering. Most of today’s search engines use content filtering systems. While every search engine has its own secret sauce consisting of hundreds of ranking criteria, content relevancy is basically measured by density (the number of times the word occurs relative to the size of the document) and proximity (the occurrence of the terms near one another).

Recommendations-based algorithms with collaborative filtering offer the advantage of making recommendations based partly on content analysis and partly on the recommendations of individuals or groups. This brings the wisdom of crowds to users evaluating products on retail sites. However, ratings can be skewed as all users don’t rate all items, and ratings are subjective. Despite this, recommendations-based search results have proven useful.

Text-based vs. behavior-driven search
Is the combination of content filtering and collaborative filtering good enough to provide optimum relevancy, or do we need more information to determine intent? Over the past decade, we have progressed from text-based to behavior-driven search.

Our first algorithms were based on text on the page with an emphasis on meta tags and keywords. Robots followed links across the web, making copies of new pages. The pages were stored in a database called the index. Robot crawlers indexed millions of pages in those days compared to the billions indexed today. This ask-and-find technology was fairly crude compared to the sophistication of today’s search algorithms.

The big change came about when Google introduced link analysis. The reasoning was that links from authoritative sites made your site more relevant for its subject matter. This worked well for a number of years until sites started paying for links, partially diluting the effectiveness of links to determine relevancy.

In response, Google added a social component to search: It offered Google account holders a personalized homepage and started using a user’s web history in personalized search results. Google has been using information from users’ search history and Google homepage for well over a year. After personalization, Google started including its vertical databases in web results so users get blended search results of text documents, images, videos and many different types of content on a web search. This not only improves relevancy for users, it provides many new opportunities for marketers, as sites can create content to rank in multiple search results.

Behavior-driven search
The behavior phase has just begun and is manifest in product-driven search for ecommerce with behavior-driven algorithms. Behavior-driven search is based on the premise that each human has a set of core values that can be identified and measured. This information can then be used to determine user intent when a query is made. For instance, if you add human intent to the history and clickstream data, queries suddenly become more relevant because the matches come closer to the person’s query. But how do we discover human intent?

The behavior phase of search technology will be based on human needs rather than on content. This means new search algorithms will be based on the needs of users rather than the needs of content providers. This approach began with the recommendations-based technology used to power large ecommerce sites, as well as the voting algorithms on social sites like StumbleUpon, SeeqPod (music search), Scouta (media recommendations), and Criticter (movie reviews). Collective wisdom can be useful because it helps people make decisions by becoming aware of what other users like or dislike about any product or item.

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Recommendations-based search engines
ReadWriteWeb provides a list of ten recommendation engines besides the usual suspects like Netflix and Pandora. Among these are MyStrands, MatchMine, Zync and StumbleUpon. Not only does recommender technology play an important role in ecommerce, it is increasingly being used in general search engine algorithms. That’s because it’s a well-known fact that people trust people they know more than advertisers when it comes to product recommendations. So, it’s a no-brainer that recommendations-based technology will become pervasive in the search industry as technologies develop and mature.

The power of site search
Recommendations-based technology is creating new ecommerce revenue opportunities and is increasing both customer retention rates and the number of shoppers who become buyers. This is possible with the one tool that lets shoppers personalize their shopping experience: site search. With advanced site search and good navigation, shoppers can immediately filter hundreds of thousands of SKUs (stock keeping units) for the five or ten products they are looking for. Every dynamically generated search results page is an opportunity for a retailer to offer the right merchandising message to match a unique shopper’s expressed intent.

This combination of search and merchandising is called searchandising, and it can greatly increase conversion rates and average order values. It’s a no brainer for merchants to use the information from site search to tailor promotions for each shopper. For example, Mercado Software is an excellent site search engine for sophisticated ecommerce sites.

Customer-centric marketing
How does recommendations-based technology increase customer retention and sales? One large etailer creates a customer-centric experience by generating a microsite for each and every customer. Your site experience is dynamic rather than static and becomes more personalized as you continue to shop. Notice that after you conduct a few searches, the etailer will provide a “Recommended for you” box highlighting products related to your prior searches. In other words, if you search for an iPhone, it assumes you might be interested in other high-tech products. We’ve all seen those “customers with similar searches purchased …” promotions. The merchandising message is, “others like you bought these items, so you might think about buying this.”

You’d be surprised how effective this is, and it all takes place on the ecommerce homepage. The most important merchandising page on the site is completely automated, dynamic and personal.

This particular etailer’s revenue grew 37 percent in Q1 2008, compared to the same period in 2007 for $4.14 billion in net sales. Net income increased 30 percent to $143 million in Q1. Using similar technology, a smaller etailer increased revenue 400 percent in Q1 2008 compared to the same period in 2007. Not bad for so-called recessionary times.

So, what’s the potential for recommendations-based technology? Gartner research shows two-fifths of U.S. consumers expect retailers to provide personalized promotions. Yet, Forrester reports only 16 percent of retailers currently use personalized recommendations tools. There’s a huge market potential for recommendations-based technology.

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Vortex DNA
The latest innovation in recommender technology might be VortexDNA, a predictive modeling technology used to improve relevance for many types of online content. It can be used to improve search results, improve display ad click rates, and to improve relevance in many areas because VortexDNA is industry agnostic and can be used in a variety of situations.

VortexDNA is a plug-in that can be used in ecommerce to suggest products to customers. It is also used in the insurance industry to improve the accuracy of establishing premium rates. In television, it can help to create programming that customers will watch. In human resources, it can help match job seekers with available jobs, cutting recruitment costs. In search, it helps provide more relevant results with better personalization.

The VortexDNA plug-in contains a map of human consciousness, expressed as a seven-digit number revealing the pattern of your beliefs. It uses a unique profiling of your purpose, values and life focus to derive this seven-digit number from the essence of your intention as shaped by your behavior and actions online.

Initially, you must download the MywebDNA Firefox extension, filling out a brief questionnaire to derive your DNA number. Your DNA number is generated from the surveys you take or from your click activity. When you search or browse, MywebDNA matches your numerical profile (who you are based on your purpose, values, and life focus) with a numerical profile of links on the web.

Tip: Unless you are experienced in Beta testing new products, we don’t recommend downloading this plug-in.

The plug-in runs invisibly in the background as you browse, appearing only to circle those links that match your profile. Every time you click on a link, MywebDNA updates your DNA to make better predictions next time. You can also fill out additional surveys to enhance your profile.

Conclusion
Recommendations-based technologies are being used more and more to make search results more relevant. These technologies have the potential to improve the relevance of search results along with many applications that personalize and make the web experience more relevant for users. They can be used to optimize advertising placement, improve product referrals and to personalize website content to make it more relevant to individual visitors.

Satisfying user intent in search queries from off-site search engines or on-site internal search is a big part of the answer for making results more relevant and meeting the demands of modern-day searchers.

What’s Next? Look for semantic search to rise above Google’s current algorithm. Powerset and Cognition Technologies use systems which understand English language structure and the definitions of words to retrieve search results.

Example: In a semantic search engine, a query asking “which NASCAR drivers lost to Mario Andretti” would return a series of champion NASCAR drivers who “defeated,” “triumphed,” and “beat” Andretti. Google, doesn’t answer the query correctly; it links to several pages on the driver Andretti and no reference to those drivers who lost to Andretti. Powerset comes closer; their # 6 link in response to the same query finds a page in reference to Tom Sneva who “lost the CART title to Mario Andretti by 13 points..” coming closer to a relevant answer.

The evolution of search will continue to improve and provide a much more predictable outcome for acquiring new traffic, increasing conversion rates, retaining loyal returning visitors, and extending our business strategy online.

Recession-proof search strategies

When the economy weakens, companies will direct their attention to the marketing programs that provide the best return. Savvy marketers know this isn’t the time to cut marketing budgets; it’s simply time to ensure that marketing investments are getting the best return possible. The latest trends show that marketers are being held accountable for the return on their marketing investments, but companies are not cutting marketing budgets.

“B2B Marketing in 2008: Trends in Strategies and Spending” (MarketingProfs-Forrester Research) shows that marketers are increasingly being held accountable for marketing ROI in terms of business metrics. More than 70 percent of B2B marketers surveyed reported having systems in place that tie marketing success to business outcomes.

The same survey shows marketers are not significantly decreasing marketing budgets due to economic concerns.

• 45 percent of B2B marketers surveyed reported marketing budgets will remain unchanged.
• 50 percent reported an increase in marketing budgets with average increase of 26 percent.
• 6 percent reported a decrease in marketing budgets with an average decrease of 18 percent.

Search provides accountability and top ROI
Search marketing accounts for more than 40 percent of internet marketing, and research shows it yields top ROI. However, marketers must know how to closely track organic and paid search campaigns to see exactly how the campaigns break out in terms of performance. This not only helps justify marketing expenses to management, it also allows you to achieve even better performance.

The returns on measurement through web analytics can be significant when you use your customer data as actionable intelligence, whether management is calling for increased revenue from the corporate website or seeking a better return from your marketing campaigns. Let’s say you are under the gun to improve performance for organic and paid search campaigns. Here’s where knowing what to measure and how to analyze results with web analytics is key.

Organic and paid search synergy
Too often, marketers are overly focused on paid search results. However, it is clear that implementing both natural and paid search campaigns will empower you to more successfully accomplish your interactive business goals.

Paid search advertising is effective for increasing traffic volume to a website. Natural search is essential for building credibility and providing validation in the SERPs. When the economy is challenging, many companies increase their branding efforts. That’s because in a competitive situation, the stronger brand will get the sale. Using both natural and paid search gives your brand the opportunity to place its products and services in front of millions of prospects 24/7 for both direct response and branding.

Today’s marketers get the best results with integrated marketing programs that take advantage of the right marketing channels for their products, region and industry. It’s always important to know how well your marketing campaigns are performing, especially when the economy pauses. Today, more than ever, it’s important to use web analytics and campaign optimization to gauge and increase ROI.

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Measuring search performance
Web analytics tools can perform a quick analysis of the core keywords in your industry, also enabling you to research competitor paid-search advertising trends and statistics for that industry. These tools can track and trend natural search results as well, modeling and predicting the benefits. Analytics tools are indispensable for tracking competitor search performance so you can understand how to leverage their strengths and weaknesses to your own advantage.

However, it’s important to use accurate, clean data for best results. All your online advertising campaigns should be tagged with URL-tracking parameters to accurately measure site performance and/or online marketing campaign performance when executing dual natural and paid search campaigns.

Search, both natural and paid, is a significant driver of traffic for most websites. As the economy softens, there is increased demand to prove investments are working and to know how well. That’s when measurement becomes essential.

When you measure search performance, your web analytics reporting tools typically provide you with quite a bit of information right out of the box. You’ll be able to see how much traffic your site received from each search engine. You’ll even be able to see what search terms visitors used to view the paid or natural listing that led to your site. Before you can accurately measure search campaign performance, however, you must have established your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Key Performance Indicators
KPIs are important metrics that can help you measure progress toward achieving website and marketing campaign goals. They must be quantifiable metrics that will indicate success or failure in meeting your established business goals.

When measuring search metrics, start by identifying site goals to be achieved with paid and natural search campaigns. You might want to measure year-over-year page views and the percentage of new visitors, identify conversion leads and engagement metrics, or look at homepage performance or international markets, depending on the nature of your site.

You must know who your visitors are and what they’re looking for to set specific, quantifiable goals. Depending on your site category and business goals, the table below offers a few examples of KPI reporting.

As an addendum to your executive KPI report, you should include a search engine marketing scorecard.

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SEM scorecard
The SEM scorecard is an ROI report for organic and paid search results, showing the SEM triad of organic brand, organic non-brand and PPC keyword results. Note: you must break out your brand vs. non-brand keyword data to separate online and offline impact on organic traffic acquisitions and conversions.

While the primordial term SEO (search engine optimization) should receive the credit for all organic non-brand keyword traffic and conversion data, brand managers typically involved with offline advertising should receive the credit for all organic brand keyword traffic and conversion data. The third group in the SEM triad, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, should receive the credit for PPC keyword traffic and conversion data.

Drilling in deeper than traffic and conversion, ROI is positive when [value-per-acquisition] is greater than [cost-per-acquisition]. Therefore, a key metric within your SEM scorecard should be the “Conversion Value to Spend Summary.”

As seen above, your dashboard should display a comparison of the conversion value to the investment and segregate organic non-brand (SEO) and pay-per-click. The example above exceeded everyone’s ROI expectations. Organic non-brand (SEO) return on investment is 1,653 percent and PPC is 2,372 percent.

Executive KPI report and SEM scorecard
It requires a lot of preparation to set up the right KPIs in your dashboard and score card because there are many measurable website metrics to identify and evaluate. You must select the metrics that accurately reflect your business goals. KPIs are never permanent because your site goals can change, and your KPIs should change accordingly.

Allocating resources can be challenging, and this is where analytics modeling can help.

Analytics modeling for paid and organic search
Analytics modeling can be used to better understand how to allocate your resources and improve the performance of your search programs. To dig deeper into how the analytics modeling process works, I interviewed President and Chief Technical Officer Gary Angel of SEMphonic for in-depth information about tracking the results of individual paid and organic search campaigns.

When tracking dual SEO and PPC campaigns, Angel suggests adding a distinct campaign code to your PPC URLs during set up. This helps to learn the all-important split between natural and paid traffic.

“If you don’t do that work, you’ll see all your traffic as natural — and you’ll be unable to effectively compare the two,” Angel said.

When used correctly, your web analytics tools can help you understand how many repeat visitors came to your site. It’s important to identify repeat visitors for loyalty programs, but you can get a lot of false positives. Repeat clickthroughs can appear in your referral logs in two very different ways. Most clickthroughs will trigger a new visit (also called a session). But sometimes visitors will click through to your site, go back to the search engine and then click through again on the same or even a different search query, leaving the false impression that the second time is a new visitor.

“Your analytics program can compensates for this, and you’d be surprised how often it actually happens,” Angel said.
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Variability in search performance
In today’s competitive environment, it’s important to look beyond your total visitors via search by measuring the actual effectiveness of search traffic. Not all traffic is created equal, and search traffic is likely to vary in quality by channel (natural or paid), search engine and keywords clicked.

There can be a wide diversity in performance between natural and paid search. Natural and paid visitors on identical search terms often perform differently because paid programs invest resources to create a custom landing page for top performance; whereas with natural search, the page is “selected” by the search engine.

The difference is a controlled landing environment.

“The entry page makes a big difference in performance and can be a reason for using PPC even when your natural positioning is excellent,” Angel said. “Sometimes, your natural landing page works better and that can be embarrassing on the paid side, but it’s easily fixed by using analytics to optimize your paid search campaign.”

Personally, I believe most search marketers are overly infatuated with paid search and continue to underestimate the power behind natural search. Based on user response, I’ve consistently seen SEO outperform PPC for the simple reason that unpaid natural results satisfy user intent on a personal, non-advertorial level. This search user characteristic, within various website categories, has resulted in loyalty, trust and repeat customers without controlling the landing environment.

The fact that visitors click on natural vs. paid listings may account for the variability in performance between paid and organic search campaigns. In fact, some search users simply don’t use paid listings, and this audience segment may perform differently from others.

“Visitors might also use natural or paid listings depending on where they are in the buying cycle (information gathering, shopping comparison, buying, etc.),” Angel said. “At times, it may appear that natural search visitors perform less effectively than paid visitors or vice-versa, whereas it’s really a case of visitors simply being in different phases of the buying cycle. When this happens, many of your campaign tracking tools will attribute sales only to the most recent campaign (and often lose visibility after 30 days).”

A major benefit of using a web analytics tool to segment your search traffic is the ability to get a better understanding of how your natural traffic performs over longer periods of time.

Learning to use an analytics tool takes time and practice before you can understand all of the metrics. As your search marketing programs evolve, you’ll find that more and more colleagues want to understand how search is impacting overall site performance. Since search programs (both paid and natural) tend to shift rapidly, that question becomes difficult to answer.

As more questions arise about search campaign performance, you may find yourself spending too much time explaining the impact of your search campaigns. If so, you may want to rely on automated solutions or web analytics consulting.

Benefits of automated analytics reporting
Automated reporting can help you solve the time dilemma. To get quality automated reporting, it isn’t enough to simply dump a batch of data into a spreadsheet and distribute it to everyone in the organization. Not only will most people be unable to find the data they need to understand how search impacted traffic, they will probably misinterpret a good chunk of the data they find.

When this happens, it might be beneficial to hire a web analytics consultant to provide easy answers to questions posed by various colleagues in different departments. Such firms have developed specific approaches to help you answer the difficult questions without taxing your time schedule.

As search programs grow ever larger and more sophisticated, there’s a big advantage to being able to accurately understand and report the impact of search campaigns on overall business performance.

Analytics: vital to marketing success
Measuring the progress and success of natural and paid search campaigns has become key for many marketers, especially in today’s economic environment. Accurate KPI measurement is not an easy task. That’s why marketers must select a robust web analytics package. I can also suggest hiring a web analytics consultant to help set up your analytics package and get you started on tracking the right KPIs.

KPI expertise is a valuable asset for marketing managers, and the ability to accurately communicate the status of online marketing programs to management becomes a requisite skill.

The returns on precise measurement and analysis can be significant with analytics modeling. You can better understand how to allocate your resources, how to improve performance of individual programs and how to explain the impact of your marketing programs to everyone in your organization — all important insights in challenging economic times.

Automated reporting helps you and your colleagues understand the impact of individual search marketing programs, allowing you to ensure that every dollar spent gets the best possible return.

Three Keys To Success With Local Mobile

In early November, Google announced plans to dominate the mobile market with its Android operating system, offering $10 million in rewards to the developers who build the best Android applications. Meanwhile, Yahoo! is busy locking up worldwide distribution deals for its Go 2.0 system and has signed up major phone manufacturers such as Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG Electronics and HTC.

Since mobile phones are in the process of becoming mini pocket PCs, there’s no doubt mobile is about to get hot. Marketers, start your engines; it’s time to concentrate on a local-mobile marketing strategy now.

The stakes
Money is there to be made despite the years of slow motion. In 2006, the mobile ad spend was $1.5 billion worldwide (eMarketer). That may seem rather puny compared to the $24 billion spent on internet advertising, never mind the $450 billion spent on total advertising for the year. The lack of interest in mobile has been mostly due to limitations of technology, which are being overcome with the iPhone and other smartphones to hit the market, not to mention Google’s push to provide an operating system with apps that make phones into mini PCs.

The problems concerning privacy are also melting away as research continues to show that mobile users will accept ads for free services. IBM Institute for Business Value conducted an online survey of more than 2,400 mobile users in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan and Australia, reporting a majority of these users would accept ads for free services. To provide a current example, Virgin Mobile USA signed up about 330,000 of its 4.8 million subscribers for its Sugar Mama program that “pays” subscribers one minute of free call time for every 45 seconds they spend interacting with an ad on their phones or the company’s website. Since the program launched about a year ago, Virgin has given away 9 million minutes of mobile talk time, as reported in Business Week.

Despite the fact that mobile spending is miniscule now, this platform will grow rapidly with its ubiquitous nature that almost imparts omniscience. Imagine the beauty of having instant access to information in your pocket 24/7 with Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 apps at your fingertips.

The monetary projections vary widely, perhaps in anticipation of advanced technology yet in development. ABI Research projected a 13-fold increase in global spending on mobile marketing and advertising between 2006 and 2011. Informa Telecoms & Media predicted mobile advertising will be worth $11.5 billion by 2011. eMarketer is more bullish, predicting $14 billion by 2011. Yet other analysts say mobile marketing can get as high as $20 billion worldwide by then.

In the U.S. alone, Kelsey Group expects mobile search ad revenue to grow from $33.2 million in 2007 to $1.4 billion in 2012, representing a compound annual growth rate of 112 percent.

The obstacles
For mobile to succeed, it will be necessary to achieve cooperation between the mobile carriers, the handset manufacturers, the software developers, and the search engines. These are the major players that have the most to gain or lose, and they’re all fighting for control. The carriers are the most anal, trying to control their customers and databases.

But the customers refuse to be controlled. iCrossing’s 2007 mobile study shows that mobile users prefer Google, Yahoo and MSN rather than the default search provided by carrier deck. These walled gardens won’t last much longer as the smartphones give users unfettered access to the mobile web.

The development of the mobile web gives your business the opportunity to extend its reach through an additional marketing channel. Competing in the mobile channel requires the following three-prong strategy.

It goes without saying that developing a site for the mobile screen differs from designing a wired site. Don’t plan on transcoding your wired site into mobile because this simply won’t give users the best user experience. You can, however, use a subdomain such as mobile.yourdomain.com or xhtml.yourdomain.com, and get a decent site with some updating and coding.

To illustrate the difference in screen size between mobile vs. PC screens, try this: if you have a smartphone, go to http://mobile.aol.com/. Then go to http://www.aol.com/ on your PC from a standard browser to see what I mean.

Here’s the mobile screen:

Here’s the web screenshot:

Keeping in mind the constraints of a tiny screen, below are some tips for designing your mobile site.

Navigation: Put navigation buttons below your most important content to display critical content above the fold, making it visible to users as they surf. Ensure navigation buttons are clearly labeled and well organized. Use text links for main navigation. Important: provide a site map. Place jump links on top, allowing users to immediately access content below the fold. Important inner pages should be within three clicks of the homepage. Be ever mindful of the small screen.

Coding: Use XHTML. Write correct code and avoid unnecessary code to ensure fast download. Use external CSS to decrease load time and ensure correct display across multiple devices with different screen resolutions. Keep file names short and keyword-rich.

Mobile SEO
Follow traditional SEO best practices by using targeted keyword copy, meta tags and links that can accommodate the small screen. Be mindful that queries are shorter (two to three words in an average mobile search query) when selecting keywords.

Avoid pop-ups, frames and Flash. Get links from relevant mobile sites. You can use press releases and blog posts for gaining backlinks. Use social bookmarking and tagging. Go easy on embedded objects (images, scripts, etc.) because they may not download correctly.

Test across devices and device simulators (Google Mobile Proxy and Skweezer). Validate your dot-mobi site with mobile code checkers (W3C Mobile Web Validator and .Mobi Validator).

Tip for local-mobile: Make your telephone number clickable by using the sample syntax below. This immediately connects users to your business when they click on your phone number.

<href=”tel:6193982670″>619-398-2670< /a>

References for mobile web development standards:
W3C Mobile Web Initiative
Open Mobile Alliance.

Panama vs. MSN: Another Search Smackdown

Who ever thought two venerable internet giants would be scrambling to be No. 2? While Google is the undisputed leader in paid search marketing, Yahoo! and Microsoft don’t even come close. You can see it by the numbers below.

As shown in the chart, Yahoo and Microsoft trail Google significantly in market share. This pattern has been consistent over the years, with Google gaining additional market share each year.

It is puzzling to see Yahoo and Microsoft continually lose market share to Google. Both search engines have devoted significant resources to dislodging the Google paid-search juggernaut. Perhaps Yahoo’s management made the wrong judgment call in waiting too long before improving its badly outdated GoTo-Overture interface. Microsoft, on the other hand, was not only late to the party, it waited too long before redeploying resources to counter Google dominance. While both firms struggle to introduce new technology, it looks like Google grabbed all the talent.

Here’s how these two firms compare against each other.

Next: A Brief Industry Analysis

Return to Introduction

When Bill Gross first introduced GoTo — which became Overture and is now Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM) – no one in the search industry took this business model seriously, except the advertisers. Despite harsh criticism for sullying the unbiased, pristine SERPs, the pay-per-click advertising model gained traction, and within a few years, paid search owned online marketing.

Logically, Yahoo should be leading the pack since it came out first and had more experience. However, Google joined the party reluctantly, ate Yahoo’s lunch and continues to dominate the $15 billion paid search industry.

Google’s secret weapon is continuous product improvement and fierce customer loyalty. There is no disputing the fact that once Google gained its reputation for relevancy, users have remained tenaciously loyal, despite the fact that relevancy is no longer golden. This monumental branding feat has proven hard to beat. As market share continued to rise, Google dominance became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Now that Panama is fully functional, and adCenter has been established for more than a year, here is how the two platforms compare.

Next: How The Two Platforms Measure Up

Return to A Brief Industry Analysis

Reach — Major Advantage: Yahoo

As shown in the chart on Page 1, Yahoo outscores Microsoft in search market share by more than 50 percent, so advertisers are going to spend more on Yahoo Search Marketing. Additionally, adCenter has not been running as long, so there is not much history for advertisers to rely on.

Top-Level Campaign Settings — Advantage: Yahoo

Although Yahoo’s campaign management platform is less than six months old, its years of paid search advertising experience have given it a true advantage in designing the new Panama platform.

Panama features an interactive dashboard that lets you quickly take the pulse of your PPC campaigns. Without having to run a single report, you can see what’s happening at the campaign, ad group and keyword level. You can also view trend line charts for indicators like ad impressions, costs and conversion rates across different time periods.

Yahoo has essentially “flattened” hierarchical campaign data so you can quickly get to the data from any level. Once you decide what issues need your attention, you can quickly drill down within a click or two and take action. This is a very clever user interface.

Microsoft’s adCenter has a good, clean and logically organized campaign interface, which most companies managing their own ad campaigns will find easy to navigate. For anyone managing larger, more active campaigns, however, adCenter’s performance can be a source of frustration. Common repetitive tasks like updating keyword bids still take too many keystrokes and sluggish screen loads to accomplish.

Account Structure — Even Score

Both Microsoft and Yahoo are using essentially the same campaign/ad group hierarchy that Google has made into a standard. This is good news for advertisers because it makes porting Google campaigns onto Yahoo and Microsoft adCenter easier, and it simplifies reporting across networks.

Next: Ad Copy and Rotation

Return to How The Two Platforms Measure Up

Ad Copy and Rotation — Advantage: Yahoo

The advantage for ad copy goes to Yahoo simply because it allows 40 characters in ad titles, while Microsoft’s adCenter (and the big-G, for that matter) allows only 25-character ad titles. While many advertisers choose to write one ad that fits all three networks, Yahoo allows clever copywriters to gain advantage with longer, and presumably better, titles.

Yahoo offers more flexibility in managing multiple ads. You can easily turn ads on/off and set them to display on even rotation for A/B testing. Both Yahoo and Microsoft offer an ad optimization feature whereby your best ads, i.e., ads with the highest clickthrough rates, are displayed more frequently.

Microsoft has an interesting implementation of dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) that is worth exploring. DKI can make ads more relevant by inserting the user’s search term into the ad on the fly. Microsoft takes DKI to a new level by allowing insertion of text into the ad title, ad text, display and destination URLs, plus two additional parameters for even more customization.

Content Targeting — Advantage: Yahoo (Going, going….)

In a quest for more clicks to sell to its advertisers, Microsoft recently began a U.S. pilot of its own content advertising network. The pilot uses the same targeting controls for dayparting and demographics as those described below. Text ads are initially appearing only on Microsoft-owned properties with other formats and web properties to be added over time. While Yahoo currently holds the advantage in this area, look for Microsoft to start closing the gap in 2007.

Ad Formats — Up For Grabs

Today, all the action is in text-based ads. Yahoo plans (discussed in Search Smackdown: Google vs. Yahoo!) “all kinds of ad formats,” including mobile and TV. Microsoft is new to paid search, but not to online advertising. It would not be a stretch to assume it will bring its broad experience with display, video and video-hyperlink ad formats into play for adCenter advertisers.

Editorial Process — Google

Okay, okay, we know this is supposed to be comparing Yahoo vs. Microsoft. The problem is that while Yahoo and Microsoft continue to enforce stricter editorial policies in the quest for perfectly relevant results, Google is making billions at their expense. Yahoo has quickened its editorial review process considerably with the Panama release. Microsoft reviews keywords before they go live.

Agency Master Accounts — Even Score

Yahoo and Microsoft both offer a master console to qualified agencies, allowing them to log in once and work on any of their client accounts. Both companies offer excellent telephone support and special consulting services for their agency clients.

Matching Options — Advantage: Microsoft

Microsoft offers standard match type options, following Google’s lead by offering broad, phrase and exact match types. However, it does not currently expand broad matches to include similar terms. Microsoft treats plurals as separate words. It is puzzling why Yahoo does not.

Negative keyword match implementations are as different as night and day between Panama and adCenter.

Yahoo lets you set 50 universally excluded words at the account level, and another 50 at the ad group level. This approach is straightforward and easy to manage.

Microsoft’s negative match offers greater flexibility because you can set negatives at the keyword level, but why did it set a one-byte limit on the negative word list? How many words can you fit into 1,022 characters, including spaces? IT guys will love this anachronism. It’s a head scratcher for the rest of us.

Next: Targeting Options (Dayparting)

Return to Ad Copy and Rotation

Targeting Options (Dayparting) — Microsoft in a Walkover

Dayparting is the ability to set your bids based on time-of-day and day-of-week. Yahoo does not currently offer this feature.

Microsoft did a good job of implementing dayparting. You have the flexibility to schedule your ads and to adjust bids at different times of the day or days of the week. To its credit, Microsoft even bested search leader Google on this one by basing the time of day on the location where the user sees the ads. So if you are trying to reach a lunch-time user anywhere in the country, you only have to select a one-hour setting. On Google, for example, you would have to set your ads to run from 12 noon (EST) to 3 p.m. (EST) to reach lunch-time users in California. Kudos to Microsoft for its elegant approach to dayparting!

Targeting Options (Demographics) — Microsoft in a Walkover

Microsoft is the only search engine to currently offer demographic targeting for search ads. If your perfect customers are 35-44-year-old women, then you can set your bids so your ads get better positions when this demographic group is clicking around. Microsoft has years of Passport and other data it is now putting to use without compromising personally identifiable information. Although Microsoft does not disclose how many searches it is able to demographically segment, we generally see better conversion rates when targeting options are turned on.

Targeting Options (Geo Targeting) — Slight Advantage: Yahoo

Yahoo’s implementation of geo targeting is intuitive and easy to set up at the campaign level. A handy map highlights your DMAs or states/provinces choices as you click each area.

Microsoft’s geo-targeting implementation may not be as sexy as Yahoo’s, but it is still a solid offering. In adCenter, you implement geo targeting at the ad group level, not at the campaign level. This makes a great deal more sense to advertisers who have distinct product lines but different marketing programs state-by-state.

Trademark — Gold Stars for Everyone

Both Yahoo and Microsoft take strong positions to protect their advertisers’ trademarks. Neither permits competitive bidding on trademarked terms, nor the display of ads that infringe on trademarks. They both take prompt, aggressive action on trademark claims. As with any trademark protection, it is up to the advertiser to report instances of trademark infringement. Affiliate marketers may not be so happy with this arrangement, especially the legit ones who have to take extraordinary steps to get their ads and keywords accepted.

Power Tools — Advantage: Microsoft

Other than offering pretty decent keyword generation tools, neither Microsoft nor Yahoo are big on stand-alone productivity tools like those offered by Google.

Within adCenter, Microsoft’s keyword suggestion tool gives you a demographic profile of searchers, which can be helpful in many ways other than building keyword lists. On its related adlabs.microsoft.com site, Microsoft shows off early versions of tools in development, all of which are fun to look at, but none are that useful for everyday campaign management.

Reporting — Advantage: Microsoft, But Not For Long

The reports available in Yahoo Panama’s interface are absolutely stunning. Interactive charts let you analyze many campaign performance issues online, without having to download and manipulate in Excel or other tools. That said, there are many common reports that are just not available in Panama, yet. Microsoft’s reporting interface is intuitive, gives you plenty of reporting and scheduling options and runs quickly.

Relevancy Ranking — Advantage: Yahoo

It is refreshing that PPC advertisers have something new and positive to obsess over instead of click fraud. Quality Indexing and ad relevancy ranking are now hot topics of conversation at SEM cocktail hours. Yahoo is doing an exceptionally good job of educating its advertisers on the why’s and how-to’s of quality improvement in its system.

While Yahoo doesn’t disclose exactly how it weights relevancy factors, it does provide feedback in its reporting dashboards on a five-bar scale, so you can see at a glance which of your ads are considered most relevant and which need work.

Conclusion
Yahoo’s search traffic volume — and the new Panama interface — have kept it solidly in second place behind Google. However, with Microsoft deploying tremendous technological resources into paid search and making strategic acquisitions, it may be angling to simply take over Yahoo rather than overtake them in second place behind Google.

Improve Search with a Dedicated Staff

As a marketing strategy, search is currently the most popular internet marketing channel, used more often than email and banner ads. That’s because it is accountable and cost-effective.

With search marketing budgets and the complexities of search campaigns continuing to increase, having a well-trained, dedicated search engine marketing staff is imperative.

Search marketing budgets
There’s strong proof that search has gone mainstream as a line item in the budget. According to the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) 83 percent of corporate advertisers plan for search engine optimization (SEO or organic search), and 80 percent plan for search engine marketing (SEM or pay-per-click) in their 2007 search budgets.

In addition, human resource departments have added such titles as VP search, Chief Search Engine Strategist and Senior SEO/SEM Analyst to their job classifications in the company handbooks. As search becomes a dominant force in internet marketing, in-house search marketing commands the attention of the CEO and senior managers.

Company management styles
First, let me say that if you work for a more traditional company, you will probably spend a significant amount of time educating top-level management on the benefits of search marketing and the importance of integrating search with traditional marketing strategies, not to mention justifying your job.

If you work for a more savvy company, you can avoid all of that because the CEO knows that search contributes to lifetime customer value (LCV), that organic and paid search listings create branding and direct response, and a combination of SEO and SEM creates lift in clicks and conversions. You can spend your time educating and leading your staff to search marketing excellence, instead.

In-house vs. outsource
In 2004, Jupiter Research reported that two-thirds of search engine marketing services were performed in-house. Since then, the number of service providers, the size of marketing budgets, and the complexity of search campaigns have all been growing exponentially, suggesting a need for more agency involvement. However, the in-house statistic remains basically the same today as in 2004.

Despite the fact that the majority of search campaigns are managed in-house, most companies do not have a dedicated search marketing staff. Jupiter Research reports that most in-house search personnel share search duties with up to five other job functions including web design, email marketing, marketing communications, market research and other functions such as banner, print, radio and outdoor advertising. That’s a mistake.

Needs assessment analysis is decisive
An important consideration when contemplating bringing all search management inside and creating a dedicated team to handle it is identifying the critical path items that must be addressed.

It is wise to conduct a professional, unbiased needs assessment analysis for in-house search marketing that will include both SEO and SEM. This will provide a solid and diversified search marketing platform with guidelines, documentation, procedures, policies, proven tools and methodologies for use by existing on-site search marketing managers, personnel and new hires.

Outsourced professional SEO campaigns can vary between $10,000 and $50,000 per month, depending on such factors as keyword competitiveness, backlinking required to improve rankings, whether or not original content is necessary, current site ranking, technical and editorial factors hindering site ranking and length of time required to achieve improved results. SEO is a long-term strategic investment rather than a one-time project. A needs assessment can help you decide whether or not in-house SEO is a viable option and what is required to build the team within your company.

In-house SEM advertising campaign costs can vary widely depending on campaign goals, keyword price fluctuations, seasonality and the time necessary for monitoring campaign effectiveness and changing bids, ad copy, and landing pages to optimize campaign performance.

Aside from managing and optimizing the in-house SEM campaign, the advertising spends with the search engines can vary significantly: from $20,000 to $2,000,000 per month. Again, a needs assessment can help you decide whether or not in-house SEM is a viable option and what is required to build the team within your company.

Some firms elect to keep SEM in-house while outsourcing SEO. I see this as a serious disconnect when it comes to measurement. Your paid and organic listings must be measured concurrently to maximize results and maintain synergy. There is no doubt SEO and SEM can be accomplished effectively in-house, but it takes the appropriate planning and allocation of resources to get the best results.

Next: How to assemble a team, and train it.

Return to Page 1

Assembling a search marketing team
Your next consideration when contemplating in-house search marketing is: Do I have the staff expertise to perform SEO and SEM effectively?

Everything should point to your business goals. Your search team will be responsible for organic search, paid search, paid inclusion, optimized shopping feeds, click fraud monitoring, brand reputation management, link-building strategies, affiliate marketing, business development and viral marketing.

You will need people with excellent research skills, copywriting skills, technical expertise, and quick learners who are detail-oriented and have a high tolerance for change. People with an affinity for solving complex puzzles, multi tasking and experimenting with different solutions also make good search marketing candidates.

Depending on company size, search VPs may have to deal with millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of products, multiple regional or local influences, security walls, registration walls, paid subscription walls, editorial guidelines and management egos. In-house search marketing requires a leader with consummate ability to manage change.

Search marketing projects require integration and involvement across all units of the company’s infrastructure. The best methodology will integrate search into the daily workflow through a series of systemic changes that deliver significant results. In-house search marketing systems require support including a Wiki knowledgebase, a search hub, ongoing training, standardized reports, the best tools, technical and editorial checklists, search engine policies and authoring guides so that everyone participates in unity.

Training your staff
Once your team is assembled, they must be trained. Both quality and output of SEO and SEM performance is affected by the time allocated to perform those tasks. Well-trained, experienced workers are more productive and make fewer mistakes than a poorly trained staff. Therefore, successful, cost-effective in-house search engine marketing production is dependent on a well-trained staff.

There are a number of resources and training options available. Your choice of options will depend on several key factors: company size, existing IT staff, editorial staff, search marketing staff, staff consolidation under one roof, product diversity, level of competition and current search marketing experience.

If company size and product diversity are broad, such as the big brands or a Fortune 1000 company, the best option may be to hire a search marketing training expert for the sole purpose of training your in-house staff on-site.

There is a huge knowledge and experience gap in the search marketing industry when it comes to organic SEO. Currently, there are few, if any, standards, licenses or authentic certifications available in SEO and/or SEM advertising. In addition, the continuity required for proper measurement of organic and paid search is seriously lacking in most professional business environments, despite the fact that search marketing results are measurable and accountable.

There is also a serious shortage of valuable and trusted search marketing professionals with the experience required to fulfill these tasks within a large in-house search environment. Search marketers who may have worked at eBay, Yahoo! or other well-known companies within a “search marketing” capacity will have a very focused and specialized skill-set typically centered on the paid search environment with little or no SEO skills or visa versa.

An alternative is to hire someone who will experiment in creating the fundamental policies described above, a sort of on-the-job training. However, for a company seeking immediate in-house search marketing capabilities, this can cause unnecessary delays, redundancies and expenses.

A third option is to utilize online or off-site search marketing training resources.

Whichever route you choose, the bottom line is that those companies that take search engine marketing training seriously in the years ahead will remain strong and competitive in their market.

Defending the Art and Craft of SEO

Organic search engine optimization (SEO) is an effective marketing strategy that provides marketing accountability. There are several reasons why organic links are so valuable. The reasons cited below come from industry research:

1. Well-optimized sites enjoy sizable gains in unique visitors and conversions.
2. Search users prefer organic listings to sponsored listings.
3. Organic listings produce more conversions than other online strategies.
4. Search engine listings provide branding.
5. SEO provides an excellent return on investment (ROI).

Organic SEO’s track record

Research and case studies document the effectiveness of organic SEO for increasing qualified traffic and sales. Here’s just one example from SEMPO’s case studies:

A pure SEO campaign for Wyndham Hotels’ wedding services conducted by Proceed Interactive generated more than 3,000 wedding-related leads for the 20 resort properties listed on the site during the first year. This represents an average of 9.9 leads per day or approximately 290 leads per month, representing over $21 million in potential business. In March 2005, Wyndham booked approximately $182,000 in wedding services through these sites.

While SEO sounds like a must-have marketing strategy, many marketers seem to prefer paid search strategies.

Paid search rules

PPC (pay-per-click) text ad listings generate the bulk of search marketing revenues. Incredible as it sounds, Google gets 95 percent of its revenues from AdWords. SEMPO reports that PPC accounted for 82 percent of search engine marketing revenues in 2004, while SEO got a paltry 12 percent share.

Yet organic listings are valuable and longer lasting. They provide branding and produce an excellent ROI. So why is SEO lagging so far behind? Many decision makers are either uninformed or misinformed and need to be educated. Some think it’s a black art, which it certainly is not if search engine guidelines are closely followed.

What obstacles must SEO overcome?

In Danny Sullivan’s “Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense of SEO,” he describes the difference between “content-SEO and other flavors.” Basically, he’s talking about white-hat and black-hat SEO techniques. Below are a number of obstacles that may hamper organic SEO from ramping up in the revenue stream:

• Abuse of SEO techniques that damage relevancy.
• Proliferation of black-hat SEO techniques that result in penalty or removal from search engine databases.
• Auto-submission software that over-submits when misused.
• Unscrupulous vendors that over-promise and fail to perform.
• The website design best-practices disparity between web designers and web-standards advocates versus SEO practitioners.
• The long wait for organic SEO to show results.

Abuse of SEO techniques

An excellent SEO technique, if used properly, is the use of ALT tags to describe images. ALT tags should contain a brief text description of the image, which will appear upon mouse over. This text is also read aloud by voice-activated screen readers for low-vision users. Search engine spiders will pick up relevant keywords in ALT tags. However, this has been abused by some SEOs who put countless keyword repetitions in ALT tags without relevance to the image. The spider doesn’t know the text isn’t relevant to the graphic and simply thinks this is keyword-rich material. It’s a dirty trick and can be very frustrating for disabled people who depend on ALT tags to accurately describe website images.

Black-hat techniques give SEO a bad name

The controversy between white-hat and black-hat SEO techniques has existed since the inception of SEO. Basically, the white-hats use optimization techniques recommended in the Webmaster Guidelines from the major search engines. The black-hats disregard some of these guidelines to get higher rankings. Disregarding the guidelines can result in penalties (lower rankings) or complete removal from the search engine’s database.

Google’s Webmaster Guidelines warn against:

• Hidden text or hidden links
• Cloaking or sneaky redirects
• Automated queries to Google
• Pages loaded with irrelevant words
• Multiple pages, sub-domains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
• Doorway pages created just for search engines

Yahoo! gives you a longer list of what’s not wanted here. Techniques discouraged by MSN are shown here.

The dangers of auto-submission software

Google’s guidelines specifically state, “Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.” That’s because these programs consume computing resources, and Google claims they violate their terms of service.

Auto-submission software was accepted in the early days due to the relatively small size of the internet (approximately 20 to 40 million public documents). Currently, with more than eight billion public documents indexed in Google, and given that search listings are a huge source of revenue for search engines, there is scant possibility for submission software to be effective. Submission services won’t improve your search engine listings and can inadvertently lead to search engine spamming through over-submission, resulting in removal from the engine’s database.

Shady SEO vendors

Ever get an unsolicited email offering to submit your site to 1,500 search engines? Our industry, and the internet in general, is vulnerable to unrealistic marketing schemes promising fantastic opportunities, quick results and bargain prices. These schemes have persuaded thousands of site owners to invest in products that claim to build traffic but fail to deliver. SEO is a worthy objective, but consumers are vulnerable to the hundreds and thousands of disingenuous internet vendors claiming to be credible, with no ability or intention of fulfilling their promises.

Disparity between designers and SEOs on site design

Designers know the importance of building a site that will attract search engine traffic, but not all are proficient in search engine optimization techniques. By the same token, SEOs normally aren’t trained in website usability.

You need a well-designed site for consumer usability and accessibility, as well as one that’s properly optimized for search engine visibility. To quote designer and SEO expert Shari Thurow, “Usability and search friendliness go hand in hand.”

Maybe it’s a right-brain, left-brain thing. Designers are focused on aesthetics and technology, delegating content tasks to writers. Some designers give secondary importance to the site text, with the attitude that it’s just an insertion into the design. Online writing gurus like Nick Usborne believe, “…the purpose of the design is to support and showcase the text.” One solution would be for more designers to hire SEO copywriters to create their content.

Looking at it the other way around, the SEOs are focused on keyword-rich text, Meta Tags, inbound links and search-engine-friendly site architecture. That’s because they know what search engines are looking for in text, links and HTML code when indexing and ranking web pages.

Some of the cool stuff designers use, like Flash, heavy graphics, frames and dynamic content, are detrimental for indexing. There are special treatments for dynamic sites, but some of these design techniques should be avoided.

Bridging the gap between designers and SEOs

Education, training and mutual understanding are the key. Search engines read pages in ways designers might not expect. They’re focused on text, code and links. Design and esthetics don’t matter when spiders crawl websites. However, design and persuasive copy are imperative for converting prospects and customers. That’s why you have to design a website for both customers and search engines.

The goal is to design a site that is both spider-friendly and user-friendly. If the designer doesn’t know how to make it spider-friendly, he or she needs to consult with an SEO expert at the get-go. It’s always easier and less costly to incorporate SEO principles into the design before rather than after.

The long wait

Improving your organic search engine rankings can be a slow process. That’s because of the way search engines work. The crawler-based engines have three parts: the spider, the index and the algorithmic software.

• The spider visits web pages to read text and follow links within your site. It comes back on a regular basis (monthly or bi-monthly) to pick up changes.
• The index holds the documents found by the spider in a database. Copies of spidered pages are kept here, and the database is updated when the spider brings in new or revised pages. This process takes time, causing a delay between indexing and updating the database.
• The algorithmic software is unique to each search engine. It evaluates billions of pages in the index, sorting them according to relevancy, in answer to keyword search queries. Most algorithms are based on text, code, architecture and inbound links.

So while it can take months before your organic links appear, or show improvement, in search engine results pages, your paid search listings appear immediately.

Paid search versus organic SEO

The cost-per-click fees for paid search have been rising significantly over the past few years. Some experts think the industry is nearing maturity and that price increases won’t be sustainable in coming years. Paid search popularity, however, remains strong.

While it’s wise to utilize both PPC and organic SEO techniques, the powerful benefits of SEO should not be minimized. The durability of your organic SEO investment goes a long way in elevating your brand to a premier position in the major search engines — because organic links are valued by the majority of users and account for the majority of offline conversions.

Getting into the top 10 organic listings may be a slower process, but ultimately it can be worth more than perching at top of the sponsored listings.