Global Language Monitor recently declared that Web2.0 is the millionth word to join the English lexicon. The significance , apart from linguisitic one, is the fact that Web2.0 which hitherto remained a technology jargon has now found a spot in the mainstream language. This has happened owing to the revolution Web2.0 has unleashed in this information age. Knowing Web2.0 and making one's presence felt in it is as important for survival as survival itself. This should probably apply well to business/non-business organisations/individuals. Just being out there will serve no purpose. One's presence should make some noise so that it grabs attention. It is here that search engines come to the rescue of online publishers. In the process search engines have engendered what is called search marketing.
With exploding web page population, Internet is getting more cluttered with every passing day. Search engines are quickly becoming the gateways of information. Web users more often use a search engine to reach a desired page. Thus, he shall be the winner who gets a favourable search engine endorsement - meaning being in the top 20 results in a search engine result page. Being Google-friendly or search-engine-friendly is extremely crucial for the success of any online offering.
Web2.0
Web2.0 loosely refers to a new generation of online content. Internet has long before ceased to be a plain repository from where people fetched information. Now it has become a place where anybody can generate content. This has been rendered possible by Push-button publishing where online publishing is a quick and easy process. Social networking websites like the Orkut, Twitter etc have made things further simpler. Thus today each and every netizen is a potential publisher. This opens up a unique opportunity for marketing products, ideas and people.
Web2.0 and Marketing
In a competitive world there is need for each and everyone to market oneself. Be it an individual or an organisation the rule is sell or succumb. One might wonder why should an individual ever market oneself. Let me take an example of a MBA student aspiring to join banking sector. Services sector is a knowledge economy where professionals are hired for the knowledge and expertise they possess. Gone are the days when a person joins a company, works for it the whole life and one fine day retire with social security packages.
A professional's life has started to move away from a 'settled' lifestyle to a 'corporate nomadic' lifestyle. Every few years the knowledge professional hops from one company to another. When this is the lifestyle there is a need to have something that can reflect a person's personality on a sustained basis. Web2.0 is an excellent tool just for that. A weblog can serve the purpose of establishing an online presence and can be strategically used to build reputation (meaning visitor base). Reputation so built can help the corporate nomad in moving from one lush patch to another. The said MBA student can build a reputation through his blog for interesting and innovative write-ups. Even one article that shows the discernment and innovativeness of the student can help her land-up in her dream job. It is an open secret that HR executives of top companies always research their candidates on the net.
Though a blog or any other social medium offer lucrative opportunities, there is one potential brick wall. The Internet is just flooded with web pages. The number of web pages online is in terms of billions. This has made a majority of netizens rely on search engines to help them get to the page they need. Thus if at all one needs a potential visitor to know that one's blog exist then it should pop up on a search engine's result page. That too in top 20 or 30 links. This has opened a new arena in marketing called search engine marketing or search engine optimisation.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO might sound like Greek to many professionals and students of marketing. But it is nothing different from the marketing that Kotler taught us. Search Engine Marketing is all about positioning a web page so that it appears as a favourable choice in the eyes of a search engine. Just like any other positioning strategy, SEO involves understanding the demographics and behaviour of the target customers ie, search engines.
Search engines typically employ a three step process to offer the search service. Firstly it sends out web-bots or crawlers which crawl over the net and fetch web pages. Secondly the pages are indexed based on the content found on them. Finally when a user types a search string, relevant pages are identified from its massive databases and presented in the form of a result page. So from a marketer's point of view the task is two-folded. First the page should be accessible to the crawler and secondly when the indexer reads through the page it should be able to index the page just for the desired keywords.
Search Engine Behaviour:
Positioning requires understanding the behaviour of the customer. Google, being the most widely used search engine, is invariably considered as the biggest and often the only customer. The most important aspect of Google's search behaviour is how it identifies the relevance of a particular web page for a particular keyword. Google states that it follows a complex proprietary PageRank algorithm to do this job. The algorithm uses more than 500 million variables and 2 billion statement to identify the relevance. One of the most important part of this procedure is the way the indexer treats 'inbound' links. Every inbound links( ie links in other pages pointing to our page) is considered a vote or a citation for that page. Thus among two pages with 100 and 50 links from pages with identical page ranks, the former will rank higher than the latter. Further it also uses what is called hyper-text matching procedure. Suppose for a search string like "heart disease", the indexer looks at all pages containing these two terms, the distance between these terms in the page, their font size etc before deciding the relevance of any page.
Thus if a marketer wants his page to be relevant then it has to Google-friendly. SEO is all about making the content of the page appear more desirable from the eyes of the search engine. Thus it involves a lot of job which a webmaster (website designer) should do. There are elaborate guides that help webmasters in white hat optimisation techniques.
But there are more to the idea of SEO where Web2.0 plays a crucial role. One essential tool for SEO is back-links management. A back-link is nothing but an inbound link. In the era of Web 1.0 getting back-links was really tough. But now with the emergence of weblogs and other social media, it is in fact easier to get back-links. For instance many Web2.0 users can actually publish posts, comment on them, create profiles etc. These are the opportunities where they can promote their blogs. Emergence of what is called as vertical search engines and online directories again have made the job of getting back links a fairly easier job.
(More about vertical search engines in a later post).
At the end of the day all search engine optimisation techniques drill down to the idea of creating content that is valuable from the target user point of view and such a content is laid out effectively in the form of web pages or blogs. SEO can go a long way in building the traffic for a website/blog. Online advertisement, lead generation, permission-based database marketing are just a few avenues that are thrown open by generating online reputation. With more and more users coming under the clouds of internet, search marketing is all set to boom.
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