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become, which I subscribe to fully. His
Search Engineering view is that this market will be at its
B
E A U T I F U L A R T I C L E by Associate Editor hottest in between two and four years’
Jessica Tsai (“Search Engineering,” July 2009, time. It’s still in its infancy and there is
http://sn.im/0709tsai). Search engine optimiza- plenty of room for new and innovative
tion (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and online entrants to the social CRM market.
marketing in general continue to be hot topics. The the- Ian Hendry
ory is, why chase customers when they can find you? Yes, when done right, it can CEO, WeCanDo.biz
work quite well. hendry@wecando.biz
Ms. Tsai does the subject matter justice, with a thorough (even fantastic)
overview of SEO. There are a few things I’d like to add to her efforts, however, that Managing Editor Joshua Weinberger
I believe will help the CRM masses. responds: Thanks for the feedback, Ian. I
1) The design and user experience of the site itself is critical. While not part of certainly agree that Jeremiah has plotted
SEO, per se, there is a very important connection: There’s no point in driving traf- a thought-provoking potential future for
fic to a visually unpleasing and/or dysfunctional Web site. Guests will judge a book the expansion of the social Web—not only
by its cover, and if they don’t like what they see or how it works they will bounce. In did we cover the release of his report
order to fully benefit from SEO (i.e., inviting guests over), we believe more compa- (“Social Media: The Five-Year Forecast,”
nies should first focus on cleaning up the house. http://sn.im/gw4nc, April 27, 2009), but
2) The article focuses on the value of a Web-site “homepage,” but the current he adapted its central thesis for a column
approach is that there is no such thing as a homepage anymore. Since search engines in our June issue (The Tipping Point,
will drop a person into any page of a site, it’s not safe to assume the homepage will http://sn.im/0609tp, June 2009).
be the point of entry. The relationship can start anywhere, so plan accordingly. I may not agree with every aspect of his
3) One essential factor that’s too-often overlooked—click fraud in paid search— plotted future, but it certainly appealed to
appears in one of the article’s sidebars (“Bad and Ugly SEO”): “Some reports indi- me enough that I embedded its premise
cate that one-third of clicks on paid search are fraudulent—the result of developers (along with thought leadership from
creating bots to click on competitors’ ads, raising those competitors’ costs.” many, many others) in the first draft of our
Even with Google’s much-vaunted AdWords/AdSense, some estimates put the Social Media Maturity Model, which also
click-fraud rate above 15 percent. Either figure represents a pretty significant appeared in that June issue. The original
amount of waste to not be aware of—especially for anyone new to pay-per-click model is at http://sn.im/0609chart, and
advertising. Yes, search engines say they prevent it but the general bel