The Indispensability of SEO – It's Not About Metatags Anymore

Why few businesses can succeed without ongoing search engine optimization

If there's one rule of thumb that applies to most marketing challenges today, it's this: Don't waste your money on conventional advertising. Your next customer is already looking for you somewhere else.

According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 40 million Americans use a search engine every day. Pew also found that the younger you are and the higher your educational achievement, the more you searched. No doubt about it, the wired world asks hundreds of millions of questions online daily.

Which begs the question: How many Internet queries is your business fielding?

Back in the good old days – five or six years ago – Internet searches were still kind of new and it was a lot easier to bring visitors to a particular Web site with a few tweaks. Heck, you could just throw a few of the right words into a homepage's metatag – a short description of your site within the page's hidden code – and see some effect.

But everything's changed. It's not just the Yellow Pages that Google and Yahoo! have made obsolete. It's also many of our fundamental lifestyle habits. Today most American adults use these two search engines routinely to:

Shop for a new car

Help select a child's school

Move funds between accounts

Find a mate

Unfortunately for marketers, searchers are getting a lot more picky about search-engine rankings. According to the Web marketing firm Eye Tools, Inc.:

56.6 percent of Internet users abandon their searches after the first two pages.
About 55 percent of searchers check one result only.

The escalating SEO war

At the same time that searchers are looking beyond the first two pages of search-engine results, getting your site on those pages is a lot harder than it used to be.

Currently, most SEO experts agree that the search engines Google and Yahoo! account for more than 75 percent of all Internet searches. The two companies closely guard their secret formulas for ranking sites (mathematical algorithms). But we do know the important factors in rankings:

How many other Web sites link to your Web site.
The prominence on your Web site of the same words that prospective patients use in their Internet searches.
The amount of relevant information on your site and how often it's updated.

All this makes SEO management more complicated, meaning that it takes ongoing effort to get a site high in search rankings and keep it there. In highly competitive industries and markets, it requires a weekly or even daily program to stay ahead of the competition.

The Vanishing Newspaper Is the daily newspaper dying? Or just catching its breath for a new competitive sprint in a different format? The Pew Charitable Trust's annual report on American media says people appreciate journalism perhaps as much as ever. But mass communications is reaching a pivot point in accelerating changes. Online Journalism Booming While newsrooms are shrinking alarmingly quickly, many major daily newspapers are seeing mushrooming growth in online readers, according to Editor and Publisher magazine and the Nielsen research company. As of 2008, some newspapers have seen a doubling in numbers of online readers in just a year. Moms Mad for the Web Parents are among the highest users of the Internet, significantly outpacing couples and singles without children, according to a variety of sources.