Archive for March 15th, 2007
The classical cycle of advertising starts by first researching what your customers want. You collect data, and you spot trends. Then you research (or guess) to where these people are paying attention; what media they are watching, what events they are attending, and what streets they are passing through.
Other forms of advertising exist of course, but I will not get into them here.
In this model, you try to be where the customer is, you try to present them with a message that you hope they are looking for, and you try to answer questions you assume are in their minds.
With the Web and with search engines, this model is facing some limitations. Now, people have a “place” through which they can search for whatever they want whenever they want.
When I open the TV, I want to watch a certain program, I don’t want to see anybody’s irrelevant advertisement. When I go to a concert, I don’t care who sponsored the singer’s flight, I just want to enjoy the event.
BUT… When I’m about to plan for my holiday, I actually want to know which companies have the best deal.
This is one of the very rare instants in which you can target your advertising only to the people who are willing to receive your information.
This is how “search marketing” started to evolve. Smart companies started to know the importance of being listed high on search engine result, and the amount of traffic it brings to their websites. Enter SEO (search engine optimization).
This field aims at having your company listed at the top of search results for the keywords related to the products/services you offer. This is done by researching what people are searching for, how they might view your product, and most importantly how search engines work.
This involves both technical and marketing knowledge, and it is both, an art and a science. When internet marketers discovered this in the late 90’s, they started manipulating search engines with certain unsavory techniques that would list their pages at the top of search results. Many of these pages were meaningless, full of irrelevant content that was just designed to attract users to the page. And since these sites had advertisements on them, they would make money just because many people viewed those ads. Of course the ads were irrelevant, and the users dissatisfied. This is one of the reasons that industry crashed.
Now, since search engines are much more sophisticated, and can detect these techniques, webmasters are trying to improve their content as much as possible, and trying to implement legitimate techniques that would rank them high on search results. Eventually, I hope, the most relevant and highest quality content should be rewarded by being at the top. However, the Web is made by humans, for humans. There will always be the human factor, and we will always need to market. This makes it more and more interesting. SEO is there to stay.
You can familiarize yourself with the basic terms of this industry by referring to this SEO glossary.
Many other resources exist in this field.
Discountclick is provider of this service and even have an affiliate program, with a generous 20% commission on all sales generated through any publisher.
My favorite SEO tools site is seochat. Check the left sidebar and try them, they can give you a great idea bout these concepts and help you understand your site or blog. To help you understand how search engines read your site, try the spider simulator, which shows exactly how sites are indexed.
Since I’m interested in many things in life, these fields are really exciting for me. They allow, force, and help me to learn more and more of everything, and keep my mind connecting stuff together.
