Internet Marketing Focusing on Search Engines

By Jim Lovel

September 7-13, 2001

When David Ryan wanted more people to find the Web site for his software company, he hired an Atlanta company that promised to move Marketingcentral.com to the top of lists compiled by Internet search engines.

Visits to his Web site jumped from a couple each month to several each day.

"We've never had better leads in our pipeline," said Ryan, CEO of Marketingcentral LLC of Atlanta.

Tricia Robinson, vice president of marketing communications for Socketware Inc. of Atlanta, had a similar experience with a Florida company that moved her software company from the bottom to the top of the lists returned by search engines. Today, the search engine results are the company's third-largest source of new clients, Robinson said.

"That's good results for us," she said.

Both companies are using one of the latest trends in Internet marketing. Called search engine optimization, the technique involves building and coding Web pages that will make them among the first listings returned by a search engine.

"This is a new industry that people are just now catching on to," said Stacy Williams, founder and president of Prominent Placement Inc. of Atlanta, the company that moved Marketingcentral.com near the top of the list compiled by search engines. "It just makes sense."

Companies are trying to capitalize on the Internet as a marketing tool and giving them position on search engine returns does that," said Andrew Wetzler, president of MoreVisibility.com of Boca Raton, Fla., the company that placed Socketware high on the list.

The industry is so new that there is no professional organization that compiles statistics on the effectiveness of search engine optimization, but industry experts who follow the trend say it is increasing in popularity.

"Every company that does any business on the Web is going to have to consider it," said Danny Sullivan, editor of the online newsletter Searchenginewatch.com, which reports developments in the industry to more than 175,000 subscribers. "If they don't, they are being foolish."

Sullivan said he has been following developments in search engine optimization since 1995 and publishing the newsletter since 1996, but he didn't se a significant rise in the number of companies using the technique until the dot-com crash began last year.

"People realized that banner ads are expensive and don't work that well," Sullivan said. "Search engine returns are more cost-effective than banner ads and have higher click-through rates. It's a primary source of information for a very targeted audience."

Jim Strob, president of Position Technologies Inc. of Geneva, Ill., a company that provides software for search engine optimization, said the technique has replaced banner ads as a primary Internet marketing tool.

"I doubt there's a Fortune 500 company out there who isn't concerned about it," Strob said. "It can certainly make or break a company."

Fewer than 1 percent of Internet users click on a banner ad, he said. People looking for a specific service or product are far more likely to click on a link provided by a search engine than a banner ad, he said.

As the use of search engines has grown, so has the number of companies that provide optimization. Williams left her job as director of marketing for the Atlanta advertising agency Kilgannon McReynolds Inc. in February to start Prominent Placement.

Williams now has 10 clients including her newest, NBC Enterprises of Burbank, Calif., which hired her in August to maximize the Internet exposure of the network's newest syndicated daytime talk show, The Other Half, which premieres Sept. 10.

MoreVisibility.com has been in business for almost two years and lists about 200 clients, including Kraft Foods Inc. (NYSE: KFT) of Northfield, Ill., and Lucent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: LU) of Murray Hill, N.J. The company is adding about 15 clients a month and has been profitable since it opened, Wetzler said.

Getting a company to the top of the search engine list and keeping it there is a complicated process, Wetzler said.

First, his company determines the potential audience for a Web site and determines the keywords that audience most likely will choose when using a search engine. Then, his company adds those keywords to the Web site to ensure that the search engine finds them. His company also registers the Web site with each of the major search engines and monitors any changes in the criteria of each search engine that might affect the returns.

Much of the technique is done through "reverse engineering" because most search engines don't reveal the criteria they use to compile the list of returns, Sullivan said. Companies study the construction of the Web sites that are at the top of each list and copy the format, he said.

"It takes a lot of trial and error," Williams said. "Nobody knows everything about how these search engines work."

For Socketware and Marketingcentral, hiring a company to keep their Web sites visible costs less than assigning an employee to learn the techniques and constantly monitor changes at the search engines.

Prominent Placement charges as little as $1,500 initially and $100 each month for basic service to as much as $6,000 initially and $500 a month for all four of its placement services.

MoreVisibility.com charges about $800 every six months for each keyword used to identify a Web site to a search engine.