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If You Launch It, Will They Come?
The emerging science of search-engine marketing
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Business New Haven
9/3/2002
By: Melissa Nicefaro
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Simply designing and maintaining a Web site may not be enough to get traffic to your site. In the wide world of the Internet, those who plan to do commerce can‚t always rely on word of mouth. The Internet marketing sector has taken off in recent years. And as eVision president and author of The Guide to Search Engine Marketing, George Asbland says in the interview that follows, search engines can be fantastic allies.
A business comes to you wanting to start a Web site. Where do you start?
Some of our clients actually have us do the Web design and development and if that's the case, that's the best time to start thinking about search-engine marketing, which is a part of Internet marketing. We closely look to see what people are searching on in search engines that relate to a company's business - whether products or services or information. Based on that research and looking at competitor sites, we can include the key words or search terms in the text of the pages and in headings, metatags and title tags. If you see some areas are being searched on a lot that might be subsidiary to your site, but related, you might include information about those areas just to attract people to the site who are searching.
For example, there is a wholesale travel agent that sells packages to agents. You can go to their Web site and get passport and visa requirements for everywhere in the world. So travel agents are going there all the time. The site is well-indexed in search engines, so travel agents find it. They use it routinely. At the same time, they're seeing the wholesaler's sales messages and links to their packages. That kind of thing can really pay off if you think about it during the redesign.
Like mortgage companies that offer calculators right on their sites?
Right. Anything you can add to your site that is useful to your target market to get your prospects coming back to the site over and over to use it and also, search engines will pick it up and people will start finding your site because of it. Understand that many people finding this secondary information may not be in your target market. But some will.
Do site owners have to register with search engines, or do the search engines find the sites?
They will find you as long as there are links to your site and it does start growing over time. But I wouldn't rely on that. It can take a long time. You really need to submit. For some search engines there is no cost. You can go and submit on your own for free. There are some that charge a fee. Then there are some that offer both. Companies are going to pay us for search-engine marketing even though we're submitting for free, but there are also some fee-based search engines that we handle.
There is a lot of crossbreeding in search engines. I would say just about every one of them gets some results from another. America Online gets most of its results from Google. MSN, Yahoo and Google are the top three, depending on which way the results are measured. There are two main [measurement] sources: Nielson and Matrix Media. One will be a measurement of the number of searches and the other will be a measurement of search time. If you look at search time, Google is far and away No. 1.
What other areas of Internet marketing are important?
We deal mostly with search-engine marketing and strategic linking. The industry calls that 'link building.' To a lesser degree, [we deal in] newsletter marketing, banner advertising and e-mail marketing. The results for banner advertising have been pretty dismal. It can pay off if it's very, very targeted. One way is through search engines. You can have banner ads that come up at the top of a search. Those can be extremely effective because they can be so targeted, but they are extremely expensive. The other way to do targeted banner ads is to find quality, high-traffic Web sites in your target market and put a banner ad on it; that can pay off. The thing that really pays off is search engine marketing.
Is Internet marketing a quickly changing business?
It's changing all the time. It's incredibly fast, hard to keep up on. There are organizations emerging and the search engines are constantly changing how they rank your sites. The things that we do are basically changing based on the way they change. In the past there has been a lot of what the search engines consider to be spam or unethical messages. There is an emerging organization for search-engine marketing that is trying to build 'best-practices' standards for search-engine marketing, and we try to follow that. The thing that people have to be careful of is that a lot of what these companies say they will do could get you banned from search engines.
What we do when a company hires us is an analysis of what people are searching on. Then we go through the entire site and come up with modifications that will help with their results. It's not just linking. We're also concerned with making sure that when someone sees your listing in the search engine, it gives a compelling sales message to attract them to your site. Some of the recommendations we make can take quite a bit of time. In some cases we recommend they redesign the whole site before we spend too much time on search-engine marketing. Once the modifications are made, then we start submitting. For most customers, as long as they're not in a hurry, we recommend they use a free-submission on the majors. We do all manual submissions on the major search engines. Some will offer automated services, but they just don't do a good job. You really need to do manual submissions. Go to the Web site, see how they're indexed, see what problems there are and fix them, and re-submit where needed. Do that periodically.
There are programs available, either for a search-engine marketing company like myself or that a company could buy, and they will automatically submit your information to search engines. We use one tool - but we only automatically submit to the secondary search engines, or the ones we're not all that concerned about. One of the biggest problems is many times a message will come back and say the application was successful, but it wasn't. The search engines really don't want automated submissions because they are so overloaded that they don't want it and they do everything the can to stop them.
What are the differences between a directory and a search engine?
A search engine is a database of Web pages. When you submit an application, anywhere from two weeks to a couple of months after you submit, they send a robot out to read your site and they index what it reads. A directory like Yahoo! typically has a human look at your site and evaluate it.
Is one better than the other?
No. There are some that offer both, like Google. A directory has browsable categories. It is very important when you are submitting to a directory that you pick the best category to submit to. That's another problem with automatic submissions. They tend to choose a default category or one that is wrong. What you suggest to a search engine, they may decide something different. They reserve the final right which category you go into.
Are there any other major issues in search-engine marketing?
Link-building like at Google and AltaVista. AltaVista started it, but Google has refined it to a science. When someone searches on a phrase, what happens at Google and other search engines is, in order for it to determine where it is going to place each Web site in the rankings, it goes through a tremendous number of calculations. It looks at every page where it sees the phrase on your Web site and does a density analysis and tries to determine how relevant the phrase is that you're searching on. A growing part of what they do is what's called 'link analysis.' In a fraction of a second, it goes through its whole database, looking for other sites that have links to your page or site and it evaluates them and looks for the same search terms near your link. Based on the quality and quantity of links to your Web site, it raises you in the ranks. It's called 'page ranking' in Google. It's a real important factor. So you really need to have a link-building campaign in place to find quality Web sites to link to yours. We don't look for those sites to provide you with ranking; we look for them for traffic from your target market.
Where do e-mail marketing and newsletter marketing fit in?
These are two areas that are paying off pretty well. There are two ways to do e-mail marketing. One is the wrong way: spam. The right way to do e-mail is 'opt-in,' where people are being sent e-mail because they've said they want to receive it. That can allow you to be very targeted in who you're sending mail to. It can be real effective, but it can also be real expensive, at ten to 35 cents an e-mail. If returns are good, it can be very effective.
As for newsletter marketing, there are a ton of companies out there that write the newsletters for your target audience and you can sponsor it. That can be real effective, too.
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