Print Solutions July 2006
COVER STORY
The Theory of Search Engine Marketing
| In Brief |
A consultant shares ways that companies can obtain paid placement in search engines and advertise on the web as well as design their sites for search engine optimization. |
 “You don't want your site to look like every other site in the industry or like your competitors. There's always that dilemma.”
Susan Kelly, president
San Ramon, Calif.
Susan Kelly (info@rainemedia.com) is president of Raine Media
(www.rainemedia.com) a management consulting services firm that offers
marketing, technology and business optimization services. |
An industry expert weighs in: How can keywords and phrases produce optimal
search results on the web?
“So I've built my web site…now what?” That's the question you may ask after investing thousands of dollars and numerous man
hours creating a web site that is both informative and eye-catching. But from
some marketing consultants' perspective, building the site is only the first step in establishing an online
presence. Now you must make sure that prospects and clients can find your site
in the vast maze that is the World Wide Web, and you do this by achieving the
best search engine placement possible.
Raine Media, San Ramon, Calif., helps clients with search engine marketing in
two categories: paid advertising listings and
“organic” or unpaid search listings. Among paid listings, there are:
1) paid placement
2) directory paid inclusion
3) XML (per-URL) paid inclusion whereby a search engine is fed information
through XML rather than through the normal
“crawling” process, in which a software “bot” collects information from each page of a web site.
4) banner ads, pop-up ads and browser toolbars
Susan Kelly, president of Raine Media, says many companies purchase search
engine keywords related to their industry to
“make sure their web site is searchable and that it gets results.” Many search networks allow companies to bid on keywords and phrases that are
associated with a cost-per-click fee.
“You can decide if you want to spend the money to purchase these keywords. But it's about $1 per click and that can get very expensive,” she says. For companies that want more traffic to their web sites but lower
expenditures for search engine placement, there are other ways to advertise
that are almost as effective as the pay-per-click method but less intrusive
than banner and pop-up ads.
“The sidebar, the bar on the right side of the screen on search pages, is a
little cheaper. Though it doesn't look like it, it is online advertising,” she says.
Also, companies should not underestimate the power of “organic” or unpaid search listings. For this to work, company web sites must undergo
search engine optimization, which according to the Raine Media web site is
“the act of altering a web site so that it does well in the organic,
crawler-based listings of search engines."
“You embed in your site those industry keywords with hyperlinks,” Kelly says. “The spider or crawler software will pick up the thread of those keywords
throughout your web site." The crawler indexes pages that are found and stores them in its search engine.
But Kelly says designing your web site with keywords and phrases for search
engine optimization is difficult. You want to be searchable but
“you don't want your site to look like every other site in the industry or like your
competitors. There's always that dilemma. How do you get some of the buzz words that will really
ring with people but not be cookie-cutter? It's hard to not be the commoditized flavor of the month.”
