The Search Engine Industry

The Importance and Ongoing Challenges of Search Engine Marketing

The growth of e-commerce is astounding. In 2001 online holiday spending reached $13.8 billion (Goldman Sachs, Harris Interactive and Nielsen/NetRatings). Forrester Research estimates that this year, worldwide e-commerce revenues will reach $6.8 trillion. Today, optimizing your website for prominent search engine placement has become a fundamental component of any online business plan. Whether or not you call it search engine optimization, search engine positioning or search engine marketing, if you're not employing a search engine placement strategy to ensure that your website comes up prominently in the results section on major search properties, you're not making the most of your website investment and furthermore, you're most likely losing business.


Search Properties that Matter

Not only is Web traffic growing, but so is the need to address a larger number of search properties. Is submitting to hundreds of search engines going to generate more and more traffic to your website? Not necessarily. If you search far and wide, you'll find there are vast numbers of search sites, however, there are only about 10 properties that merit attention. Yahoo! is still the biggest player -- driving in excess of 38% of overall Web traffic. Google and MSN are also key players. So it won't help your online marketing initiatives to submit your site to hundreds of small search engines that nobody uses. In contrast, your search engine placement strategy should target all the major search properties in order to drive qualified traffic to your site - the specific audiences that are looking for your products or services.

According to a report released by BrightPlanet in 2000, there are more than 100,000 content-rich searchable databases available on the Web. Their studies suggest the existence of a hidden "deep Web" with an estimated 500 billion individual documents, most of which are available to the public. The Web now contains some 8.4 million unique websites according to the Online Computer Library Center. In December 2001, Google announced that it now provides users access to over 3 billion documents. This is an amazing number, considering the estimated size of the Web was only 2.7 billion Web pages in November, 2000.

The challenge of Web success is clear -- the search engine and directory industry parallels the explosive Web traffic trends. If your company doesn't address all relevant search engines and directories for optimum search engine placement, you exclude a large segment of your target audience.


Unfathomable Search Engine Placement Competition in an Ever-Changing Industry

Online searches are the most widely used method of attracting traffic to a website - with research confirming that over 80% of prospective Web customers use search engines to find solutions and vendors. Furthermore, only the top 30 search results will ever generate serious traffic. It won't help a company or its product to rank anywhere below position 30 (or below the third page of search matches).

If your website is not found in the top 10 to 30 search results in the major search engines and directories, your site is a billboard in the woods (SM) -- nobody will see it. It's tough competition for top search engine placement -- your site's chances for a top ranking may be one in 58 million matching documents, and the search landscape continues to evolve.

Each of the major U.S. search engines and directories uses a unique methodology, algorithm or formula to determine a site's relevance to keyword queries that considers a variety of HTML elements of a website. Relevance requirements are also evolving rapidly -- dozens of new positioning challenges arise on a weekly basis. Combine all these factors, and top search engine placement is a complex and ever-moving target to hit.