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The
Importance and Ongoing Challenges of Search Engine Marketing
The growth of e-commerce is astounding. In
2001 online holiday spending reached $13.8 billion (Goldman Sachs, Harris
Interactive and Nielsen/NetRatings). Forrester Research estimates that this
year, worldwide e-commerce revenues will reach $6.8 trillion. Today,
optimizing your website for prominent search engine placement has become a
fundamental component of any online business plan. Whether or not you call
it search engine optimization, search engine positioning or search engine
marketing, if you're not employing a search engine placement strategy to
ensure that your website comes up prominently in the results section on
major search properties, you're not making the most of your website
investment and furthermore, you're most likely losing business.
Search Properties that Matter
Not only is Web traffic growing, but so is the need to address a larger
number of search properties. Is submitting to hundreds of search engines
going to generate more and more traffic to your website? Not necessarily. If
you search far and wide, you'll find there are vast numbers of search sites,
however, there are only about 10 properties that merit attention. Yahoo! is
still the biggest player -- driving in excess of 38% of overall Web traffic.
Google and MSN are also key players. So it won't help your online marketing
initiatives to submit your site to hundreds of small search engines that
nobody uses. In contrast, your search engine placement strategy should
target all the major search properties in order to drive qualified traffic
to your site - the specific audiences that are looking for your products or
services.
According to a report released by BrightPlanet in 2000, there are more than
100,000 content-rich searchable databases available on the Web. Their
studies suggest the existence of a hidden "deep Web" with an estimated 500
billion individual documents, most of which are available to the public. The
Web now contains some 8.4 million unique websites according to the Online
Computer Library Center. In December 2001, Google announced that it now
provides users access to over 3 billion documents. This is an amazing
number, considering the estimated size of the Web was only 2.7 billion Web
pages in November, 2000.
The challenge of Web success is clear -- the search engine and directory
industry parallels the explosive Web traffic trends. If your company doesn't
address all relevant search engines and directories for optimum search
engine placement, you exclude a large segment of your target audience.
Unfathomable Search Engine Placement Competition in an Ever-Changing
Industry
Online searches are the most widely used method of attracting traffic to a
website - with research confirming that over 80% of prospective Web
customers use search engines to find solutions and vendors. Furthermore,
only the top 30 search results will ever generate serious traffic. It won't
help a company or its product to rank anywhere below position 30 (or below
the third page of search matches).
If your website is not found in the top 10 to 30 search results in the major
search engines and directories, your site is a billboard in the woods (SM)
-- nobody will see it. It's tough competition for top search engine
placement -- your site's chances for a top ranking may be one in 58 million
matching documents, and the search landscape continues to evolve.
Each of the major U.S. search engines and directories uses a unique
methodology, algorithm or formula to determine a site's relevance to keyword
queries that considers a variety of HTML elements of a website. Relevance
requirements are also evolving rapidly -- dozens of new positioning
challenges arise on a weekly basis. Combine all these factors, and top
search engine placement is a complex and ever-moving target to hit.
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