This is an interesting article by Gord Hotchkiss of Search Insider titled, “Rules of Three in Search.” It presents some useful stats and discusses Yahoo’s decision to add 4 sponsored links as opposed to the traditional three.

Personally, my eyes have always naturally gravitated to the natural search results, as opposed to the sponsored links; therefore, I place a lot of importance on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as a cost-effective means of directing traffic to my business’s website. This means doing such things as keeping a good ratio of meta data to keywords used throughout the content of the site, consistently updating pages with fresh content, and even having a blog. Apparently I am not the only one either. According to a Marketing Sherpa article, “Organic results (free listings) are far more important and can get more viewership and clicks.” Nevertheless, $5.5 billion was spent on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) in 2005 in comparison to $660 million on optimization for organic listings. (Side note: How can you accurately track how much was actually spent on SEO?)

But I am by no means discounting the importance of SEM and sponsored links for a business. If anything, I think it further legitimizes a business because it complements the natural search section, and demonstrates that the business places a great deal of importance on whatever the particular keyword is. If they are paying a substantial CPC (cost-per-click) to attract me to their site, I immediately deduce that the chances are high they can serve my needs. My next thought is whether I want to charge that business to attract me to their site, or if I want to spare them the cost and clickthrough on their natural search result. Usually I am nice. :~)

What I believe Hotchkiss hints at in his article, and what interests me, is that Yahoo could be taking a risk by adding an additional sponsored link. It could drive more people to use Google instead, because many users do not like excessive amounts of advertisements, or even just the thought of it. Also, making users scroll down to see the top organic search results could cause irritation and attrition. Just a thought. I guess we will see….

Technorati : marketing sherpa, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo, sponsored links, yahoo

This entry was posted by Robert Payne on Thursday, July 20th, 2006 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.