Complementing our recent story on Search, Simon chatted with search engine marketing specialist, Nic Halley, who’s been in the online industry since 1995 and was one of the originators of Search Engine Marketing in Australia. He currently manages Toyota’s SEM activity.
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The art and science of search engine marketing is developing at a rapid pace. More and more customers are using the Internet as their first port of call in making a purchase decision and as a result, more and more companies are using paid and organic search to direct customers to their business.
As search engines like Google change their search algorithms daily to stop unfair manipulation of search terms, there is a growing and bewildering array of techniques that need to be mastered in order to stay ahead of competitors in the fight for relevant traffic.
Meta tags, keywords, image tags, niche directories, link building, pay-per-click, AdWords - those are just some of the simpler terms that are taking up more space in a marketer’s brain.
And the amount of brain space required for search-related thinking grows every year. Search expert Greg Jarboe, one of the speakers at this year’s Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in New York, pointed out in his column in ClickZ that this year’s conference included 33% more sessions than at the 2004 SES conference. Meanwhile, only about 10 sessions had the same title as sessions in 2004.
Jarboe writes, “This means that more than 80% of what we learned in 2004 (about search engine marketing) is no longer being taught in 2007. Or, to put it another way, less than 20% of what you need to know today is something that you could have learned three years ago.”
At last something different is happening in the world of search interfaces.
Ask.com has released a new look interface which radically changes the presentation of answers by a major search engine.
The search query answers are displayed in a three-panel screen that includes standard links to search results, lists of related searches and results from blogs, as well as video, photo, news and shopping sites.
Ask’s new interface is unlikely to have a significant impact on the world of search, but kudos to them for introducing something new.