RE: UKNM: seo budgets

[Lucy Cokes \(*\\*\)]

Dear Ian,


I couldn't agree more - still haven't managed to get any examples of big

companies that have spent anything significant on this - any ideas?


The future of search will be purchasing of position and keywords, like in

goto and google (AdWords) etc.  It is going to be difficult to turn back the

time on the way that websites are being built.


The report I was referring to was published in NMA on 2nd Nov - details of

this are:

"Just under half of the 500 sites surveys did include meta tags or had

significant body content to enable some indexing - however even these showed

lack of understanding of how search engines would index the site

effectively. In over half the sites even the title tag had solely the

company name and didn't contain any other phrases."


This research was carried out by Web Search Workshop not us, but in my

experience this is exactly correct, of course it does entirely depend on

which 500 sites they surveyed and this important detail was not given.


I can't think of many business models where they would not want to be found

by search engines, except of course those where design is all important and

they have a huge marketing budget, or I guess for those few sites that do

not want to be found.............


Lucy

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-----Original Message-----

From:

ownerchinwag [dot] com

 [

ownerchinwag [dot] com]On">mailto:ownerchinwag [dot] com]On

 Behalf Of Ian

Tester

Sent: 23 November 2000 10:55

To:

uknmchinwag [dot] com

Subject: UKNM: seo budgets



lucy asked


"I want to know if anyone has any thoughts on why companies seem to spend

such a small percentage of their online marketing budgets on SEO, Directory

submissions and directory advertising when supposedly 80% of people use

Search Engines and Directories as their first port of call in finding what

they want online."


a lot of factors as far as i can see -


1. too many people in the industry don't understand the technology behind

their sites. as a whole, the industry has too many old-world marketers who

simply don't bother to learn the new rules. this is a general problem   -not

enough web marketers, so just get someone in from P&G - they *must* know

what they're doing, huh, cos they sold shampoo?

2. these old-world marketers are far more interested in "sexy" marketing -

they know it, it's easier. brand, brand, brand

3. site design teams are in general *crap* at optimising sites for engines -

even leading agencies just don't pout in the work to learn about it. prove

me wrong, go on.

4. the figures around search engine referrals are dodgy at best anyway - i'd

love to see the methodology for your 50% figure. . .

5. not *all* sites gather / want a lot of referrals from search engines - it

may not fit with their business model.

6. it's not a problem of measurement. stripping site logs on even the most

basic site logs is child's play, with a little application. parsing search

terms from referrers also. there's no excuse.

7. there are *very* few people that really know how search engines work, and

a lot of people that think they do. i've tripped up, with even basic

knowledge, a lot of so-called "specialists". . .

8. lots of modern site serving technology, e.g dynamic pages actually works

against indexing.


i feel the hatred coming down already.


i


Ian Tester, Business Accelerator, EMAP Digital

http://www.emap.com - building the most exciting media company in the world

Exmouth House, Pine Street, London EC1V 0JL, UK

T 020 7868 7574 F 020 7868 7514 M 07880 557692 E

ian [dot] testeremapdigital [dot] com

AIM iantester



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