Sunday, July 8, 2007
- Crull Chambless
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is certainly a prevalent buzzword for
today’s marketplace. Unfortunately, it is one of those terms that’s
often heard, but rarely understood by the masses.
SEO, according to Wikipedia is a subset of search engine marketing,
or the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web
site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic")
search results. SEO can target contextual search, local search, and
industry-specific vertical search engines.
Essentially, your site is optimized for the best results that tie in
to marketing your website to popular search engines like Google,
Yahoo!, MSN, etc. So why is this important?
Website marketers cited Search engine positioning was the top method
to drive traffic to their sites (66%), followed by email marketing
(54%). Source: Direct Marketing Association.
As such, the most cost effective way to market your web site online is
to obtain several top 10-search engine rankings in the major search
engines for your keywords.
According to a recent Jupiter Research Survey, searching on the
search engines is one of the main uses of the Internet among 79% of
users. Source: September 2002 Jupiter Research Survey. So
that being the case, whatever your promoting you'll want to make sure
it can be found on the first page of the search engines results page.
The reason is numerically simple. An Iprospect Survey in 2002 reported that 78%
of web users abandon their search if the first 3 pages don't provide an
answer to their question, and 28% don't scroll past the 2nd page of
results. Source: Media Post article reporting results of Spring 2002 Prospect survey.
Combine those facts with the Internet's explosive growth rate of 1.8
Million people worldwide going online every week for the very first
time, Source: Official Guide To Internet Promotion and you can soon appreciate what a top 10 ranking can mean to you.
Google receives approximately 39.4% of all search engine traffic.
Yahoo receives approximately 30.4%. They're simply the largest search
engines being utilized online today.Bringing up the rear is MSN at
29.6%, and AOL 15.5% then Ask Jeeves with 8.5%. Source: Nielsen//NetRatings January 2004
How much traffic is that? Well, Google and its partner sites were
reporting a whopping 250 million searches a day in February 2003.
Imagine what that means for us in 2007? Source: Searchenginewatch.com 2004.
With all said, you can easily see how your search engine rankings
are directly proportional to the traffic your web site receives, and
your site traffic is directly related to your potential to profit
online.
Oh, and in case your wondering how much money is spent online; a
recent Forrester Research Report indicated that online spending reached
$95,700,000,000 million in 2003! That's a cool 95.7 billion dollars.
Projected online spending is estimated to grow to $229 billion in 2008!
A whopping 139% increase in online spending! Source: Forrester Research
Now with these facts in mind I'm confident you can clearly see what
a top 10-search engine ranking can mean for your bottom line. Although
it does leave a question unanswered in my mind, what has a higher
ROI... organic search engine optimization or paid search?
Stay tuned to part 2 of our discussion…