In response to a lot of recent client enquiries on how long it takes to get found on Google, I thought it’d be a good idea to give an explanation. Many website owners feel that their site should be on the first page for their keywords, and are surprised and disappointed when this doesn’t happen immediately. We always repeat the caveat: it could take between six and 12 months before you get found. In most cases, it’s less than that, but you need to be prepared for the way Google deals with new websites, and newly optimised websites.

Many people think that Search Engine Optimisation is more of a dark art than a science, but really it’s just a case of moulding your site to fit what Google likes. If Google can’t understand what your site is about, or if Google doesn’t realise that your company is an industry leader, then we work to help Google like your site. This is an ongoing, and sometimes protracted, process.

Getting into the top 10 results on Google is not getting any easier, and Google is always inventing new ways of deciding how relevant websites are for a particular search result. Old chestnuts like (excuse the techy talk) link popularity, H1 tags, ALT text, meta Description tags, etc., have fallen by the wayside. While they still figure in the mix, there are so many different factors at play. Are searchers clicking on your site, where are your links coming from, is there much readable text on your home page, how is your website designed, where is your site hosted…the list goes on.

Add to this the fact that Google would prefer you to spend money through their AdWords programme rather than give you free ‘clicks’, and you can see why the forces are stacked up against your website getting high rankings anytime soon.
But work at it, and stay the course, and you will see an improvement. The simple things work best, but waiting is often the best option. Pepper your homepage with keywords, try to have content-rich pages on your site, submit your site to the directories, and check back every three weeks to see if rankings have improved.

And if you don’t see instant results, don’t be disappointed. It’s a long-term strategy, but it will pay off in the end.

In yesterday’s Media section of the Guardian, several Internet frontrunners attempted to peer into the crystal ball and tell us what they saw. A very interesting article indeed, with contributions from MySpace, YouTube, Google and other heavyweights.

But one section I found to be very interesting was by Maurice Levy, CEO of Publicis Groupe, who was predicting future trends in advertising. Levy, who is referred to in Wikipedia as a “French advertising magnate”, made some very cogent points about the future of interruption advertising.

Levy argues that, in an era where people are vocally against advertising that ‘interrupts’ their enjoyment of a programme, show, website or newspaper, advertisers will need to seek more creative means of reaching their target market. “This implies a brave new world of engagement and involvement between marketers and consumers”.

As far as online is concerned, I have to disagree. Ads on popular websites are rarely given the attention that their designers had hoped. Click-through rates are miniscule. And for every successful viral promotion or online game, there are countless others being decried as shameless publicity stunts.

More than ever, search engine marketing is the basis for online advertising. Being found when users search for your products and services is still by far the best way of raising your sales.

While Google is working to increase its hold on advertising outside of search, expect some innovation. But in terms of achieving measurable results from online, search is still the key and in that arena, simplicity rules supreme.

Accepted wisdom: submitting your website to web directories such as the Open Directory, Yahoo (with a $299 fee) and Best of the Web will increase the number of links pointing to your website, thus improving your rankings on Google and the other search engines.

But submitting to directories is getting more and more difficult, for three main reasons:

1.  They are almost all paid submissions now. Yahoo charges $299, Best of the Web costs $40, BCentral $50, JoeAnt $40, $70. While these directories give good link popularity (thus helping your rankings), it’s hard to justify these spends for such indirect (and intangible) benefits.

2.  Of the directories that don’t charge, about 60% require that you link back to them. This is so frustrating when we’re manually submitting client’s sites to directories - you get to the submission process, then realise you have to link back to the directory to get a listing. What right-thinking corporate website links to a spam-filled directory?

3.  Of the remaining directories (the Open Directory and a few others), there is no guarantee that your site will be listed. In most cases, you won’t be told that you’ve been listed - all you can do is come back and check to see if you’re there.

At the same time, these directory links are very handy for getting your site established on the Web and in the search engines. If you’re not already listed there, go to www.dmoz.org, find the correct category, and submit your website. There are other directories out there - make sure you’re listed in Irish-specific ones such as Browse Ireland.

Ultimately, it might be best to submit your site to the Yahoo directory and some others such as JoeAnt, Go Guides, and BCentral. While this in total would cost $459 (currently €313.65), it’s worth trying for a year to see the impact it has on Google rankings. If it can move you onto the first results page quickly and efficiently, it’ll be money well spent.

There’s a very good list of the top directories here. Also, check out the 54 free directories list here.

If you’ve been paying attention you’ll know that Google has purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion. I know what you’re saying - “it’s dot-com madness all over again”. YouTube is one of the most popular websites around at the moment, and with good reason - it’s got some really cool videos, like Where the Hell is Matt?, the Dance Scene in Napoleon Dynamite, Ronaldinho’s skills, OK Go’s synchronised treadmilling (if that’s a word), the girl who took a photo of herself every day for three years, and many more.

YouTube gets about 20 million visitors every month, and over 100 million clips are watched every day on YouTube. For many people with high-speed connections and a nice big monitor, YouTube is replacing that traditional box in the corner. When you can skim from an Elvis Costello video to Tommy Tiernan to the famous De Niro scene in Taxi Driver, what need have you for television, with its neverending ad breaks and nights with absolutely nothing on?

The implications of YouTube are revolutionary, and this is why Google has splashed out so much. But the question remains as to how Google stands to make money. Here are the options:

1. Showing a little ‘commercial message’ in the bottom corner of each video. This is interesting, as the ads could be targeted to the content of the video. So, for example, if you’re watching the De Niro clip above, the ad could say, “Get Taxi Driver on DVD”.

2. Using Google AdWords on the YouTube site. I’m not sure if this, done alone, will re-coup the $1.65 billion anytime soon.

3. Charging users to watch videos. I can’t see this happening, there would be an outcry from the YouTube community, and visitor levels would dwindle very quickly.

It’s likely that advertising will find its way onto YouTube in some form or other - Google didn’t splash out that much money to keep such a good thing going - but already people are saying that it was a very smart move. Watch this space - developments here have the potential to affect everyone who works in marketing.

“Any damn fool can put on a deal, but it takes genius, faith and perseverance to create a brand.” (David Ogilvy)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is usually measured along direct-response lines - conversions, purchases, signups, outcomes, page views, and so on. But a new school of thought is emerging - that branding and SEM are not mutually exclusive.

Branding work is cool. Its intangible makes it difficult to measure campaign success, it requires deep strategic thinking, budgets tend to be larger, and there’s no responsibility to directly drive sales. People involved in branding rarely consider SEM as an option.

Maybe they should:
- 41% of users gain awareness from online search results (DoubleClick, 2005)
- 27% of respondents are more likely to name a brand if it’s in the top spot on Google (IAB, 2006)
- Top listings have a significant upward lift on branding metrics, particularly with unaided awareness (IAB/Nielsen NetRatings, 2006)
- 60% of 3,000 respondents’ brand opinions were changed or enhanced as a result of searching (Dieringer Resource Group, 2005)

Proof that effective SEM builds brand. For those of you who still judge your campaigns by return on investment (ROI) metrics, it may be time to judge campaign effectiveness by different metrics.

The recent leak of AOL’s search data onto the Web (more info here, here and here) has prompted questions on the security of searching the Internet. Basically, AOL this month released a file containing 20 million searches by over 650,000 AOL Search users over a 3-month period. This data was intended for research purposes, but a New York Times article uncovered one of the searches. Many users were performing “ego searches” - searching for their own name - that made it easy to identify them. Heads rolled at AOL as users went into uproar mode over privacy concerns, and the data was quickly deleted. But not, of course, before lots of other sites downloaded the data and mirrored it all over the Web. There are some really interesting findings.

Almost half of all searches are in vain - 47% of searches result in no clicks on any results. This supports evidence that users tend to refine their searches by adding more keywords or by putting a country or area name at the end of the search. Thus, “digital camera” morphs into “4 megapixel digital camera dublin ireland”.

Unsurprisingly, when a user does click on a search result, he/she is 90% likely to click on a first-page result, and the top five results get three-quarters of all clicks:
- 42% of clicks are on the #1 result
- 12% of clicks are on the #2 result
- 8% of clicks are on the #3 result
- 6% of clicks are on the #4 result
- 5% of clicks are on the #5 result

If anything, this shows just how important the number 1 spot is for your keyphrases. The drop-off from 42% to 12% for second place is huge. Number 1 is still the holy grail for search engine marketers

What’s the most popular search term of all, I hear you ask? Is it “free stuff”, “ringtones”, “hotels”, “jobs”, or “jokes”? Surprisingly, none of these keywords appear in the top 50 searched-for terms on the Internet.

No, people instead prefer to search for things you’d thing they’d found already. Nielsen/NetRatings (PDF file) released a study of the most popular searches in November 2005, and came up with some interesting results.

“ebay” received just under 14 million searches, closely followed by “google”, with just over 13 million. “yahoo” clocked 8 million searches, and “yahoo.com” was searched for 6.5 million times. Other entries included “ask jeeves” (3.4 million), “msn” (3.2 million), and “ebay.com” (3.1 million searches).
Hold on. Why would anyone search for “ebay.com”? Just put a “www.” before that and you’re there! And why search for “google”, “yahoo” or “msn”? Don’t they know how to use this Internet?

No, there’s something afoot here. People can’t really be searching for the ebay website. Something else is going on.

People are using search engines in new ways – to get quickly to the websites they want. Think about it. If your homepage is Google or Yahoo, typing in “rte” should bring up www.rte.ie ad the first result. You click on it. It brings you to the RTE site without you having to go to the trouble of entering “www.” and “.ie”. Simple!

And the rise of the Google Toolbar means that you can perform a search with one click, regardless of what corner of the Internet you’re exploring.

Also, the rise (and fall and stabilisation at a mediocre takeup level) of WAP and the emergence of i-mode (which really is excellent for checking the latest scores, getting the news, booking a flight and all that) have changed the way we search. A default option on i-mode is to “Search Google”. Entering a www.domain.com address on a mobile phone is much harder than just searching “domain” on Google.

So what does this mean? Has the address bar met its end? Does anyone go to the bother of typing in the full domain name anymore? Well, I use the address bar to find sites I know, but this latest research highlights how crucial search engines have become to the online experience.

Since pay per click passed the tipping point, many Irish companies these days are sitting up, taking notice and ploughing their advertising budgets into it.

And why not?? It’s a really cost-effective way of bringing targeted visitors to your website. And you don’t have to fiddle around with optimising your site to rank high on Google. No more messing with meta tags, page titles, link popularity, and suchlike. Just set up your campaign and site back.

This is an attitude that is all too prevalent, and there are a few reasons for it. For one, pay per click is a form of advertising, so it sits easier with agencies to sell it. And, as stated, pay per click is so much easier than search engine optimisation.

It’s great to have your name up there on the results page, but there is no substitute for high search engine rankings. The number one listing above will be seen by roughly 100% of people searching. The ad on the right-hand side, on the other hand, will be seen by about 50% of people.

The Eyetools diagram above is taken from a piece of software that tracks users eye movements on a Google results page. Red areas correspond to parts of the page that are viewed by almost everyone. Orange and yellow areas are popular parts of the page, and the blue areas are viewed less by users.

Findings such as this are forcing many companies back to the realisation that organic SEO is at least as important as pay per click. Even though it’s more difficult to get right, it needs to be an integral part of the marketing strategy.

The Times has an interesting article on what can happen when SEO goes too far. Although BMW.de has been exonerated, the story has caught on like wildfire. The problem was that BMW (or whoever was working on their search engine rankings) had crowded a ‘doorway page’ with the German equivalent of “used cars” - “gebrauchtwagen”, I’m told.

Now ‘doorway pages’ are a lazy way of increasing rankings in the first place, and many agencies have used them simply as an extra service to charge for. But it’s interesting that Google has taken umbrage at this being done by such a large brand.

At least BMW are trying, albeit by unethical means. Too many Irish sites these days just aren’t appearing for what the terms that they should. It’s pretty simple to get started - some good page Titles, text on your homepage, and go looking for links from suppliers, partners, customers, etc. There are too many Irish sites who seem to be living in a pre-Internet world where search engines is an encyclopaedia of locomotives. Or something.

According to ENN, Ireland has yet again been slated for its low take-up on broadband, while Ireland’s broadband companies have been slated for their poor customer service. All this slating could roof the country, no? Then we could forget about the weather, focus on the real issues.

Which is, why are broadband companies so slow in getting back to you? I won’t name the company I dealt with (they’d be a good client, and in any case probably have a bigger legal warchestt than we do), but it took about 4 months for them to respond to an email I sent. When will companies? It’s certainly taken ****** (name omitted) enough time! Oh wait, I still haven’t received an email from them and it’s been…ooh…7 years?

Now on to football. The big event of the weekend. We are playing Sunderland. Away. Now, whatever your feelings on the McCarthy - Roy Keane spat, poor old Mick’s got it tough oop north. They’re pretty much relegated, and his job could be on the line. Meanwhile old Keano’s just got his first goal in a Celtic shirt, and Celtic are ten points ahead. Now Spurs’ grip on reality away from home is tenuous to put it mildly, but I think we’re a good bet for tomorrow. What do you think, Robbie?