Indiantelevision.com Team

(27 September 2006 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) organised a seminar on Search Engine Marketing (Sem).

Sem for the uninitiated is a set of marketing techniques used to increase the visibility of a website in a search engine's results. Sem has two parts a company can get involved with. One is organic search, which is where your page automatically appears. Ideally you want your page to appear in the first set of results as users do not often go beyond the first page.

The other way to get on page one is through paid search and sponsored links. This involves bidding for the right word at a cost on search engines like Yahoo!, Google and MSN.

Sem firm Pinstorm founder Mahesh Murthy notes that globally 650,000 advertisers use search. In India 41,600 advertisers use this service which allows for the client to target the consumer when he is looking for information on a certain product.

If someone looks for hotels in Mumbai, the aim of any hotel firm in Mumbai is to be in the result set. There are two ways to do this, one way is through organic search. The other way is to pay and appear on sponsored links. Ebay director internet marketing Abraham Thomas notes that a company should look to balance the line between appearing in organic, natural searches and paid searches. Google ranks sites based on reputation. This means that the more the number of reputed sites like BBC, CNN that link to you the higher is your page rank compared to the competition.

Quality of content and volume are both important if a firm wants to fare well in organic search. A site should avoid duplication of content. What a search engine basically does is 'crawl' or 'spider' through the pages on a site and note all the words used in the copy. Search engines are yet to understand pictures, though they can read and remember tags that are attached to pictures.

The engines then remember the content and location of these pages on the world wide web. Meta tags and title tags are important for a web page. A page should be available to web crawlers of the search engines. Thomas says that marketers need to remember that users are very specific. The average number of words used is 2.6. In both forms of search the marketer should always look to generate the relevant keywords. One of eBay's strategies is to see what keywords users of eBay use within eBay's site.

One can learrn a lot from this and thus optimise the word bids. It also allows one to discard words that are not profitable. As far as paid search is concerned one can buy keywords at a relevant time. For instance with Diwali coming up one can buy keywords associated with the festival. Once a searcher clicks on a sites link it will be far better if he/she is taken to the relevant page of the site depending on the search instead of just the home page.

Webaroo senior director, OEM sales and business development Jinesh Sonawala dwelt on the manner in which search has evolved. There are three generations. In the first generation search ranked sites only on the basis of content. The second generation search ranked them on the basis of the overall structure of the websites.

Today, technology combines the scalability of existing Internet search engines with new and important relevancy models such as collaboration, personalisation, etc. Today there are vertical search engines that further slice and dice information depending on topic. So Live Plasma works in the area of cinema and music. So fans of these kinds of entertainment can go there for more precise targetting. It offers micro contextual search results. Kosmix is a search engine that is dedicated to finance and health.

Webaroo is a new firm that looks to serve as a complement to Yahoo and Google. Basically it offers webpacks. This offers information that is the most relevant to a user. This information can be stored on a device and produced offline later such as for the mobile phone.

In terms of the experience of clients stockbroking firm Sharekhan marketing head Rajiv Prabhakar, says that half of the firm's marketing spend is online and half of that is spent on search marketing. The client base has doubled and search is more effective in terms of offering leads that can be converted into customers compared to other forms of net advertising. Each month several thousand leads are generated.

Taj Hotels Resorts and Palaces director of Internet marketing Ashok Lalla feels that search marketing should used to try and build stronger brands. After all the Taj does not need two million impressions. It only has 9000 rooms. So clients should be offered new techniques that allow to separate the brand from the bazaar. It is important that search marketing allows the opportunity for a brand to communicate an experience to the user. The search marketing firms should work with clients to build a customer base. This could even lead to loyal customers being rewarded.

Offering a perspective on search, Murthy says,"In the early days, it was easy to ‘game’ or fool a search engine spider that indexed your site. You stuffed your pages with words like 'sex' and 'Pamela Anderson' in a small font in white against a white background, visible to the search engine but not to the user and you'd get ranked high when a user searched for those words."

Now though the engines have since become smarter and started downgrading sites that try to game them. It's now a cat-and-mouse game to optimise a site to rank higher in a search engine.

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