Trends in Media Communications and Advertising

"We're moving from an era of mass communications to one of masses of communicators," said Adam Christensen, manager-social media communications at IBM Corp. B to B magazine is just one of the many advocating the use of social media as a form of advertising. Recent articles in the magazine include such titles as '5 tips for optimizing your Facebook marketing' and '5 simple rules for effective Web analytics.

SEO, or 'Search Engine Optimization' is just one of the concerns advertisers have when moving to the web. A beautiful website is a wonderful promotional tool, but it is completely useless if no one can find it on the web. SEO (and it's counterpart, SEM, or Search Engine Marketing) is the process of bringing traffic to a website. SEO gains its traffic from natural sources, such as forum links, press releases, word of mouth advertising, blogs, and reciprocal links, as well as the content of the website itself. SEM is the use of paid inclusion, such as per-click web ads and affiliate marketing.

On the website itself, you have keywords, descriptions, meta tags, and content that are found by search engine crawlers (often called spiders to keep with the web metaphor). This information is used to index a site and store that information on the search engines server. Weights are given to the keywords based on often overly complex algorithms. This determines the prominence the search engine gives the web page, often referred to as the 'page rank'. Inbound links can raise page rank, though search engines such as Google are on the lookout for inbound links created by link farms and discount those, or even lower the page rank based on the mere existence of such links.

Maintaining a quality page rank for a company website can be a full time job, and even smaller companies often hire outside consultants to assist with the often complex options available. On the SEM side, there are many marketers that use per-click advertising to get traffic to a website from a variety of sources. Per-click advertising is to simply pay bloggers and other web site operators to put an ad for your company onto their site, then pay them a set fee each time that ad is clicked and thus brings traffic to your site. Per-click advertising can cost anywhere from $.01 to $100 per click. Google-ads, Skadoogle, and ClickBank are just a few of the advertisers out there. Another form is affiliate advertising, where a company pays a commission on each purchase made after an ad was clicked through another website. Google Affiliate, Commission Junction, Amazon, and Linkshare are just a few of the existing affiliate networks.

A website must also have accurate meta tags to get a quality page rank. The metatags for one of my sites (www.thegardengoblin.com) are here:

Goblin Gardens - a crafting and gardening blog

If anyone searches for the keyword 'Green Living', my site will come up in the search. The prominence my site has depends on many, many other factors, including content, inbound links, age of the site, and quite possibly the current position of Neptune. According to Google (2009) "Google's crawl process begins with a list of web page URLs, generated from previous crawl processes, and augmented with Sitemap data provided by webmasters. As Googlebot visits each of these websites it detects links on each page and adds them to its list of pages to crawl. New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update the Google index."

To become a Search Engine Optimizer, one must understand how search engine algorithms work. The basics include unique title tags, ideally for each page in the site. If Google finds a site, the contents of the title tag are the first line displayed in the search results. URL structure is also a factor. Imagine a website as a filing system. If the search engine cannot make sense of the directory, it will not be able to find the files and thus the time and energy used to create the content may be wasted. A naturally flowing hierarchy makes the site easier to navigate for both users and search engines, allowing content to be easily found and indexed.

It is wise also to be familiar with current trends in the marketing world itself. If there is a sudden interest in green living, a way should be found to bring some of that traffic to the website. As soon as relevant content is created, the SEO springs into action, insuring there are inbound links to that content and that the content is properly tagged, indexed, and can be used to navigate around the entire site.

The SEO must also keep track of the effectiveness of per-click and affiliate advertising if using search engine marketing. Fortunately for the SEO, there are many tools available to assist. Google itself offers a variety of analytic programs to assist webmasters in improving their sites and search rankings, as well as having doing an excellent job of tracking leads through both it's per-click and affiliate network advertising. A talented SEO can take the results provided by Google and quickly turn them into that most coveted page rank, number one in search results.

Ideally, the Search Engine Optimizer should be familiar with the various programming languages used on the internet, most specifically XHTML, XML, HTML, JavaScript, Java, SQL, Flash, and Ruby. They must also keep their expertise up to date, as these languages are constantly changing, growing, and adapting to various needs. An SEO may be the same person as the webmaster. The SEO must be able to fix any site errors that pop up, as these may cause difficulties in search engine crawling.

A Search Engine Optimizer is a programmer, librarian, webmaster, salesperson, and advocate. To gain natural search results, which are generally considered the best, the SEO must be able to convince other sites to link back to their site. Thus the SEO must also be able to assist with the generation of quality press releases that contain useful and properly formatted links. Nothing is worse to an SEO than to see a press release that gets picked up and sent all over, only for it not to include a working link back to the website.

To become an SEO, a person should be comfortable with the Internet. They should know how to utilize social media and be comfortable adding content to message boards, Wikis, and other forms of web 2.0 technologies. They should also be up to date with the search engine guidelines provided by the major search engines and how to avoid any of the pitfalls that may cause a site to lose precious page rank.

References

Arens, W. F., Weigold, M. I., & Arens, C. (2008). Contemporary advertising (11th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Christie, Benjamin (2009). 2010 Advertising Trends. Gourmet Ads. Retrieved from http://www.gourmetads.com/blog/2010-advertising-trends

Dominick, J. R. (2009). Dynamics of mass communication : media in the digital age (10th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Google. (2009). Google Basics. Retrieved from http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=70897

Gross, L. S., & Fink, E. J. (2006). Telecommunications : radio, television, and movies in the digital age (9th ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Hosford, Christopher (2009). Marketers explore the era of the 'hyper-active lead'. B to B. Retrieved from http://www.btobonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091116/FREE/311169992/1150/ISSUENEWS

McMains, Steve (2008). Advertising and Marketing Trends in 2009. ArticlesBase. Retrieved from http://www.articlesbase.com/advertising-articles/advertising-and-marketing-trends-in-2009-668475.html