Search Patterns

Brandweek, Sept 11, 2000 by Karl Greenberg

Search engine optimization firms help dot-coms get top billing on all-important search engines.

With more than 2 billion documents already on the Web and an additional 1 million pages added each day, a major p art of Web site marketing involves letting the world know that a site exists, and then bringing in qualified leads to said site. While banner ads and offline marketing are obvious elements of that effort, the stone that kills both birds is a prominent position on the right search-engine results list, since, according to studies by the Georgia Institute of Technology, a whopping 85 percent of all Internet users go directly to search engines to find what they are looking for online.

Those users are also much more likely to take an action when they get to the site they've selected from a keyword-search results list, says Andy Johns, chief financial officer of New York-based Internet technology and ad distribution company 24/7. "They are highly qualified leads: The person who has typed in that keyword is clearly motivated to follow through, so you don't just get a clickthrough, you get a dramatically increased rate of conversion after the click."

Given the size of the Web, the sophistication of search engines and their expansion to include portal functionality and human-edited directories, marketers now need to know how to get top placement on the right search-engine results pages, ideally the ones a site's potential customers cross every day. But how is a marketer--who may have little experience with search engines, keywords, spiders or even what his ideal customer is likely to physically type into the search field--going to climb the ranks on a results page?

Enter search engine positioning or search engine optimization (SEO) companies, whose job is to make a Web page relevant for the keywords that are in it, or to amplify the existing keyword content of a site's documents. While some SEOs have been regarded in the past as digital mercenaries for getting their clients on top by any means necessary, according to Danny Sullivan, editor of U.K.-based SearchEngineWatch.com, others have gained respect and legitimacy as their services have become more sophisticated and crucial. "There are a few people who will go to very big extremes to get good rankings on the search engines," he says, "and they generate significant problems for both the search engines, search engine users and those optimizers who are trying to play by what good rules exist."

PROOF'S IN THE FORMULA

Sullivan explains that, contrary to the persistent myth that search results are up for sale by most portals, achieving a prominent position requires technical finesse. It also requires the keyword matchmaking skills of a digital yenta.

"The core skills that a good SEO has--understanding how people search, how to place sites in areas where people are searching and how to target those sites toward particular terms that makes sense for the client--take time to develop, and most advertisers and agencies don't have the time to do that kind of research or develop that expertise," Sullivan says.

Fredrick Marckini is founder and CEO of search engine positioning firm iProspect, whose client roster includes Sharp Electronics, Schering-Plough, inc.com, Kitchen Etc. and other companies in pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and Internet and financial services. He explains that the trick of the trade is not merely getting a client listed on a results page, but getting a berth in one of the top 30 slots, "since the 85 percent of Internet users who start their Web sessions at search engines rarely, if ever, pass the first three pages of results."

Marckini points out that iProspect's services include running a detailed analysis of a site's past performance and ensuring that the keywords--the search terms users type into search engine query fields--targeted for the search engine positioning program are the ones being queried by the target audience in the major search engines.

He points out that as recently as last year, when search engine positioning was still something of a cottage industry, positioning meant merely writing the right keyword meta tag (HTML characters and phrases that search engines "see" but users don't) on the right Web site page. "Three years ago, if you put a keyword meta tag containing five words on your page, you'd get a ranking for most of those words," Marckini says. "Of course there were only 100 million documents on the Web. Today there are 3 to 5 million indexed in the average search engine. As recently as a year ago, there were eight major search engines, now there are 20, including human-edited directories and portals with their own networks."

KEYWORDS EQUAL LEADS

Search engine positioning is not something advertisers or ad agencies are likely to tackle themselves, which may explain recent alliances between search engine positioning services, interactive agencies and advertising networks, according to Sullivan. He predicts the trend will continue.