SMarT Marketing

When I started Search Engine Marketing in 1998, there were 10 to 20 key players, instant search engine updates, Google was in beta, GoTo a new pay per click search engine had penny bids, banner ads were overpriced and black hat techniques of hidden text and tag manipulation were all the rage. Today there are 3 main players in the search engine world, content is king and offsite factors are a greater influence in your online success.

Web site promotion has grown from achieving high rankings in the search engines and outbidding the competition in pay per click search engines, ppc, to include blogging, social network sites, expert pages, podcasting, press releases, videos, user reviews, and much more.

Now people are focusing on the “Brand” experience and how well does it reflect your image and the user’s expectation. The idea of just getting tons of traffic to your site is being influenced by whether or not the user is getting the results that they wanted or do they feel betrayed or tricked.

If they feel disappointed by the content they will leave, if they are disappointed by the pricing they will leave, and if they are disappointed by the overall service and experience then they will blog and post about it online.

We have come to a point where site users play a growing role of the success of your web site. So companies looking for long term success need to make sure that the message, delivery and execution of services are always at the highest levels.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 7:38 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.