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American advertisers spent about 10 billion USD ( a 60 % increase when compared to the last year’s numbers!) on Search Engine Marketing last year alone and the trend is only likely to see an uphill climb with the medium sized and small companies realizing the importance of the SEM and SEO technology, according to the “State of Search Engine Marketing” survey.
Search Engine optimization, or SEO, is the act of getting your website listed among the varied search engines manually for no cost at all. It is only a part of an umbrella term called Search Engine Marketing – which is the act of generating increasing visits to your website and might entail aspects like ‘Search Engine Advertising’ which includes placing links and ads in Google Adsense, or the Yahoo! Search Marketing or even the new almost-dark-horse turned Microsoft Adcenter.
For a clique of experts who are adept when it comes to improving a website that can show its pretty dress through a popular search engine like Google, MSN, YAHOO or Altavista, SEM ( The term SEO is on it’s way out!) is a gold-mine. It is something they thrive on. Most search engines have just gone out of business or has been acquired by another bigger search engine, it was supposed that this SEM business would simply get easier. It turns out quite the opposite. Simply because the stakes are much higher and there are probably just three major search engines in the world. Now if everyone pays to get there, can you imagine the kind of pressure the SEM expert is bound to be taking?
A lot of people seem to think SEM is rocket science. Now, let’s be pragmatic for a while. It might be rocket science for the lawyer and the baker. But then, for Danny and Greg, it might not be. It is what they do and they purportedly do it well. That’s the way it has always been and the primary reason why money changes hands. Doesn’t it?
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing is thought to be a shady practice by a “few uninitiated self-proclaimed experts”, especially the third-party managed SEM efforts to bring up your beloved website to top the crowd of pretty pages, while the facts and of course the spending on SEM growing every year just shows otherwise. According to Danny Sullivan, in an expert rendition standing up for a fight against some petty unsubstantiated remarks on the entire industry, there is plenty of good that runs the mill within the industry and there could be some bad too. He further feels that one could objurgate a particular SEO tactic or an SEM expert, but is just not fair to castigate the entire industry.
According to searchengines.com
Once upon a time, every search engine expert focused on getting top “natural” results – that is improving a web site so that it ranks at the top of the page.
Natural SEO is still the cornerstone of a sound search engine strategy, but it’s no longer enough. Today, every search engine marketer must be familiar with paid programs search engines offer. Google AdWords, which appears on both Google and its content network, is often a must for getting your site’s name out. Other important paid programs to consider are Yahoo Advertising (formerly Overture), Yahoo Search Submit Express (formerly Inktomi), MSN’s new pay-per-click program and Ask’s Sponsored Listings.
It’s no longer enough to just get top page results for a client. Good search engine marketers offer their clients options, knowledge and experience when it comes to paid search advertising.
However, admittedly, 95% of what the third-party experts do when a client submits a website whose peacock feathers need to be displayed, is basic stuff. The stuff they don’t really have to rack their smart grey cells for. However, since they do just that and ignore the 5% of nitro stuff – something that can show your website even before your grand mother did the search, which is really not needed unless the basics have been taken care of. Just because the website did not need the nitro-boost, It is dissed by some people and said that the third-party Search Marketing consultants are out to grab your precious marketing dollars and hence not worth a dime. That is not done.
Google apparently warns that although most of the Search Engine Optimizer experts are out there to help website owners get the desired amount of traffic onto their websites by optimizing the sites, working on the basic stuff like meta-tags,CSS, HTML tags, text styles, content, it’s syndication and other little changes to the website skeleton. There are still few others who might try to rip you off your marketing dollars. But it is just a “few” of them. Not the industry in Itself. Moot point. Still noted.
In Defense of SEO, however, Danny again wrote in 2004
SEO doesn’t mean that you build a site to “trick” search engines. It doesn’t mean that you have to sacrifice good design. It does mean that you consider some basic tips that even the search engines themselves will tell you to do
While enough has been discussed about the good about the SEM industry and has been defended much better than a nation looming on the threat of war or national security, there is still some bad that plagues the industry. Spamming, defined as a shady act of trying to trick the search engines to find your sites quickly and trying to top the display ranking, is rampant in the industry like a black hole that has enough density to suck all crib-monger web-masters to gather here where it’s more juicy. This is where the devil takes over. You just work hard on your website, you source content relevant to your site, you do your Search Engine Optimization and then the temptation will the devil the hell out of you into thinking about upping the ranks on search engines and wanting to trick those spiders crawling all over the place. The spiders aren’t to be fooled now, what with the latest technology that the search engines now employ.
You burn your hands and then crib about the SEO ‘Industry’ ? Ain’t that being a little unfair?
Like most services, the service being offered here is a noble one indeed. Not everyone knows how to position your website and help it to be displayed at the earliest such that it gathers maximum traffic, which translates to ‘everything’ online. While the service is that important and provided that a few experts can really do this for you, don’t you think it is bound to attract shady operators? It does.
If you did not have anything to complain when your ipod could be duplicated somewhere on mainland china and just accepted the story. I think accepting this fact that a little bad does exist in the SEM industry does you more good than bad. So when the time comes for your website to look up pretty and perched on top of the google page 1, it does help if you forget what some people had to say about the industry, understand how difficult it is to get there, since everyone else is trying too and find the right SEM expert to help you perch your site up on the search tree.
