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Search Environment Prompts Specialization in SEM
Sectors – Mid 2006
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
May 31 2006
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The first six months of 2006 have been a period of expansion, growth
and significant change in the search marketing universe. There have never
been as many online options available to commercial advertisers and their
agents as there is right now, a trend that shows no signs of abating.
Just to keep things interesting, lot more change is expected in the second
half of the year as well.
Search engine marketing, as an online business sector, covers a lot of
virtual ground. Search engine optimization started as a cottage industry
in the mid 90’s. By the mid 2K’s, Cottage country had become
an industrial district. Today, the search marketing sector extends far beyond
the organic search results the business was originally built on.
Search is part of the mainstream marketing consciousness but as the online
environment evolves so quickly, what works in the mainstream world often
needs to morph through several experimental stages before finding a way
to adapt. The scariest and most beautiful thing about Internet is that nothing
lasts long enough to be considered a constant. There is still obviously
so much room for innovation and outright invention that the playing field
is naturally prone to change at any given time. That’s been the back-story
of the first six months of 2006.
The sudden expansion of advertising options has presented a dilemma
for the traditional, independent-operator, search marketing sector.
There are far too many methods and means of online marketing for any
one person or company to keep track of. The sector appears to be responding
by developing a sense of segmentation based on specialization that
goes far beyond the separation of organic SERPs and Pay-per-click advertising.
Today, there are at least three major search related marketing venues,
and each of which has developed industrial sub-sectors and interacts with
the others. The first is the traditional organic search results, the Top10
lists that started it all. The second venue is the paid search advertising
market that now ranges from typical PPC to video placement. The third venue
is found in the emerging fabric of social networking taking place on MySpace,
Flickr, in the blogosphere and other interactive media, an environment that
can be safely tagged Web2.know.
Each of these three venues relies on some form of search to guide users
towards information and there is a great deal of integration and interaction
between the three venues. As search functions are always reliant on key-triggers
of some sort or another, there is always a way to include key-triggers in
web documents and files.
The fall-out from change has hit the SEO sector the hardest. Consistently
overshadowed by the PPC market and suddenly challenged by social networking,
organic search engine optimization has fundamentally changed over the past
three years as Google and Yahoo have improved and innovated on methods for
ranking web documents.
There are now several sub-sections of SEO, each of which can be considered
a specialty of its own. As a practice, SEOs focus the myriad of on-site/on-page
issues as well as several off-site issues such as hosting, link-acquisition
and competitive research. There are also an increasing number of applications
on which organic search results are displayed including local, mobile and
shopping search results.
There are dozens of on-site or on-page elements SEOs work on which range
from correct site structure to various forms of copywriting to accessibility
and usability issues. It is an increasingly complicated atmosphere that
involves more hours per file than ever before, leading to the necessity
to outsource various components of a well rounded campaign.
One of the rules in most established SEO firms is that every SEO has to
have a background in website design. Without it, the SEO is lost among the
source code with no real knowledge of how a web page is actually written
or a website is structured.
Over time, the process of website design itself has become far more complex
with a widening array of file types accessible to search engine spiders
and an increasing number of CMS tools. SEOs now deal with Flash, Acrobat,
variants of HTML, and the learning curves associated with unique content
management systems. Similarly, where websites used to tend to follow a relatively
simple linear tree, they can now descend into seemingly limitless databases
with file-paths that are subject to sudden change.
The array of file types that can be present on a single web document and
the complexity of most commercial websites create a market for usability
specialization, one of the fastest growing sub-sections of the industry.
As search spiders tend to favour sites featuring fresh and focused content,
SEO copywriting has long been a specialization in the industry. There is
continued growth in this sub-sector of the industry, especially in light
of the rapid growth of the second major venue, paid search advertising.
In highly competitive areas such as tourism, real estate, clothing and
web services, SEO has always been a game of inches as competing website
optimizers work to better each other on behalf of their clients. In order
to compete, we are increasingly depending on website statistics and analysis
to tell us how visitors actually use our clients’ sites. This allows
us to make (or recommend) changes in real time, as compared to the two-three
week delay in previous years. Knowing how visitors use the site gives us
the advantage of improving traffic patterns and thus improving overall site
quality.
The second major search marketing venue is the Paid Search Advertising
market. This is the area that has seen the most growth over the past few
years, having provided the successful business model that has propelled
Google and Yahoo to the front of the pack.
Pay-per-click advertising, on the surface, is fairly straightforward. Advertisers
bid a certain amount that is billed every time their ads are clicked on.
Google, Yahoo and MSN each have significant paid-search advertising programs
but each of those programs significantly differs from the others. Widely
recognized as Canada’s leading paid-search marketing firm, Page
Zero Media employs experts in both Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing
due to the different techniques required to work within the competing programs.
Paid search advertising is undergoing several forms of expansion at this
time, allowing a number of new options for advertisers. Earlier this month,
Yahoo unveiled a revamped Yahoo Search Marketing interface that gives advertisers
more control over the timing and placement of their campaigns. Last week,
Google announced it was allowing advertisers to bid for video ad placements
alongside typical paid-search ads. Microsoft is also rapidly moving forward
with their PPC division, AdCenter.
The most interesting facet of paid search advertising continues to be in
the distribution of paid ads to third-party web properties such as the websites
of major newspaper or privately operated websites. As the major search engines
continue to find ways to distribute paid search advertising, especially
video ads, the sector servicing this market will continue to grow and areas
of specialization will continue to form.
Another specialization associated with PPC is the business of click-fraud
detection and advocacy. Click fraud is a continuing problem facing paid
search advertisers and vendors. There are now about a dozen reputable firms
that can credibly offer assistance in determining if click fraud is happening
and advocate on behalf of a client with the major search engines.
The third and most fluid search marketing venue is found in the mysterious
space known as the social networking sphere. This is an emerging area that
is growing and changing so rapidly that it appears to be more of a transition
than a plateau in web-interactive development.
Social networking is a complicated topic best described through the parlor
game, Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon. (Name an actor from the 20th century and
chances are you can put him or her beside someone who worked with someone
who worked with Kevin Bacon.) The web of personal connections we have is
immense. There is no place to prove this better than MySpace, the fastest
growing network of young people on the Internet.
MySpace is a phenomenon in the field of online communication in the same
way Google was seven years ago. There are several similar social networks
including Facebook, Orkut and Friendster however, none is as widely known
or visited than MySpace. Its immense popularity is spread, primarily, through
word of mouth. For younger Internet users, its reach and usefulness is incredible.
From the sharing of hosted music tracks, images and videos, to the formation
of user-interest groups, MySpace and other social networks are quickly becoming
the live-time meeting spaces and marketplaces of the Internet.
The basic element that makes something “Web2.0” is the ability
of users to communicate, add to, augment, debate, inform, and, in doing
all of the above, somehow alter a shared or personal environment.
Knowing how to establish social networking identities and add items or
information of interest to users of those networks is a segment of search
marketing services that is just now starting to grow rapidly.
Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN all use elements of Web2.0 ideas in formulating
their search rankings and in new features and applications they offer to
their users. Yahoo is an especially enthusiastic adopter with services ranging
from Yahoo 360, Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo Answers and the Yahoo Publisher Network
all touching in some way on Web2.0 elements. Google is also experimenting
with Web2.0 thinking in allowing its users to present quality feedback and
to affect search listings through personalization and bookmarking.
Being involved in the search marketing industry over the past few years
must be similar to the experiences of cartographers during the various ages
of nautical exploration. From the days when humans first learned to sail,
approximately 4800 years ago, we’ve been going places, seeing new
things, establishing trade, disrupting established economies, altering societies,
and documenting our experiences along the way.
According to the American Mariner’s Museum in
Newport News, Virginia, the ages
of nautical exploration spanned nearly 45 centuries, stretching
from 3200BC to 1779AD, the year Capitan Cook was killed in Hawaii. It took
4400 years for humans to produce an accurate map of the world and, though
we are knocking them off at an alarming rate, we are still discovering undocumented
species of insect, plants and even animals. Exploration and documentation
takes a long time. Cook took nearly two years to travel from Portsmouth
England to the Pacific Coast of North America on his third and final voyage.
The Age of Search, on the other hand, is only about a decade old and exists
in a world in which one can electronically travel from the Pacific Northwest
to Portsmouth England via Virginia before eating breakfast. Documentation
still takes a while but the commute isn’t as challenging as it once
was.
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