E-Business
Issue No. 16 - April/May 2004
Net marketing — The Need for Speed
Frank says there is a lot of confusion about online marketing, particularly about how search engine optimisation actually works. The vocabulary isn’t settled, the tech—speak of ‘tags’ can be difficult to understand and the point of it all isn’t clear.
At the cost end, service providers earn income by ‘pay per click’—each time a surfer visits the client’s site a hit is recorded and charged for.
For the past 18 months it has been possible to measure return on investment, so the client can see how much business is being won through web marketing and set that value against the ‘pay per click’ cost.
Frank’s company, E—channel (www.e-channel.com.au) deals mainly with bigger business. In order to see value in the process the client has to have an advertising budget, so for SMEs basic search engine optimisation is about all that can be done.
Tailoring a website begins with selecting the search engine you want the result from. This is surprisingly simple. Frank optimises sites with Google, Yahoo and MSN in mind.
“The big three have more than 99% of the market,” he says, bluntly. “Building and operating a search engine is big business these days and small players can’t compete. Until very recently, Yahoo has been using Google’s software.”
Search engines, and the lists they generate, are the primary method people use to find what they’re looking for on the web. The higher your page is on the list, the better. To generate a list, Google assigns priority according to a system of ‘meta tags’ that are characteristics of a web page. The tags are cross referenced to key words a surfer might plug in to the search engine. It is very tempting to engineer the page to get the highest listing—like adding ‘aaa’ to jump a telephone book queue—but on the web, that practice only does half the job and can backfire, Frank believes.
Google listings may be paid f...
