OnYourMark, LLC Blog

This month‘s Pro is Kristen Day, Internet Marketing Consultant at OnYourMark, LLC. Kristen brings you up to speed on the latest in search engine marketing.

Search engine marketing has not only changed in the past several years, it has undergone more extreme makeovers than most celebrities! When I started as a search engine marketer in 1999, automated submission programs, “link farms,” and “doorway pages” were common techniques used to get a site in the search engines. To understand the present, a look at the past is definitely in order.

A brief history of search engines…
Years ago, the number of search engines was staggering. During in the dot-com boom, a search engine was thought to be an easy way to create revenue. Put up a few pages of links, sell some ads and sit back to collect the spoils! Obviously this didn’t work, as few boom engines exist today. Yahoo! is a survivor, having purchased Overture, AlltheWeb, AltaVista and several smaller engines over the past several years.

In the early days of search engine marketing, there were many “tricks” a SEO (search engine optimizer) could use to get rankings in search engines. The meta keywords tag could be stuffed with popular terms that were guaranteed high rankings. This meant that an auto mechanic’s website could turn up in a search for “Britney Spears!” Automated submission and rank checking programs were popular, annoying search engine owners and taxing their resources. Pointless spam pages of links or repetitive content called “link farms” and “doorway pages” cropped up on many websites. The idea here was that these pages of links, albeit useless to an end-user, would provide incoming links to a website.

When Google came out of beta on September 21, 1999, the landscape of search changed forever. Google’s simple search box provided no-frills, no-fuss and no ads! Searchers quickly latched on to Google, which used a proprietary algorithm to locate and return pages to searcher’s query. Factors like a page’s text and relevant incoming links were now important. Quality over quantity became key. Not only did Google ignore stuffed keywords tags, link farms and doorway pages, it actually penalized sites using these techniques for being in “bad company.”

Text, text and more text…
Google’s methods extend to the top three search engines today, Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. The main factors in search engine ranking right now include optimized title tags, pages rich in content and relevant incoming links. The best thing a website owner can do is build a useful website with keyword-rich text. Text full of keywords (the words you want to be found with in search engines) is essential to search engine rankings. This is the suggestion we make most often to website owners who have little content, or have not seen search engine rankings jump as high as they could.

Get local…
Localization is also big in search. With billions of web pages online today, not everyone can be in the top 10 for general terms like “shoe store.” Adding the areas you service to the text of your pages can help local visitors find you for geographic searches like “shoe store milwaukee.”

We often accomplish this by adding a geographic footer to every page of a site, with a line of text similar to, “ABC Manufacturing provides widget manufacturing, widget parts and widget service to clients in Milwaukee, Waukesha, Racine and Kenosha counties in Southeastern Wisconsin.”

Paid search marketing…
Paying for search engine advertising (pay per click) is also going to grow. Going back to the dot-com boom, the search engines that have survived are the search engines turning a profit. Google’s AdWords program and Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) are the most prominent programs available. With these systems, advertisers bid on terms. The higher you bid, the more exposure your term receives. When searchers see your ad and click on it, you are charged your bid amount for the click.

Paid advertising can be very successful, provided budget is available. Some terms are easily available for 10 cents per click. As a term’s popularity increases, so does its cost. For example, the word “children’s snow boots” has a $3.00 top bid on Overture. This means that the top bidder is charged $3.00 every time the ad is clicked on. While large companies have expendable budget for $3.00 clicks, this is often out of a small company’s reach.

Narrowing down terms to be more specific can reduce cost. The term “cars” has a top bid of $4.00 on Overture. A budget-conscious company that only sells used cars in Wisconsin would be better off using more specific terms, such as “used cars wisconsin” at $0.84 per click. An advertiser can also try for second place which is normally just as visible as first. A $0.41 bid for “children’s snow boots” would get an advertiser second place for this term.

Taking out the trash…
A complaint I hear often is that people simply cannot locate what they need in search engines. From both a searcher and advertiser’s perspective, search engines need to focus on search again. While spam techniques are frowned upon, spam pages still get in search engines. Commercial searches in Google are often laden with results from other directories. Google and Yahoo have diversified to offer shopping, email and more, but search has suffered along the way. Hopefully, if website owners and SEOs take on the burden of providing quality content, search engines will take a step forward to take out the trash from listings.

What would you like to ask the pro? Email your questions to askthepro@OnYourMark.com!