Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor speaks with Mike Moran, the new Product Manager for IBM’s OmniFind search product, about Search Engine Optimization. (link: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/12/ten-minutes-with-mike-moran-ibm.html ). The interview is great. I don’t know that you’ll learn much about IBM strategically, but it’s interesting to me. A couple of no nonsense points that IBM’s “Distinguished Engineer” makes:

If you don’t want to take advantage of the lowest-cost way of increasing traffic to your site (organic search), then you really aren’t serious about your Web site.

Research shows that companies that show up in both the organic and paid results for a search get as much as seven times the clickthrough received for either one alone.

The most important thing to know about search marketing is that it is more about marketing than search. You need to know the purpose of your Web site, you need to measure how effective it is at driving conversions, and you must know the value of those conversions so you can know how much effort and expense you should devote to search marketing… If you don’t know how much it is worth to drive an extra visitor to your site, how do you know how much to spend doing it? If you don’t know the return on your search investment, how do you know when you should start spending money on something else?

Rankings, referrals, and conversions are the three most important (KPI’s).

Start with marketing, not with search. Know the business purpose of your site, design it to fulfill that purpose, measure its success, and experiment with improvements every day.

Every person that touches your Web site must know that SEO is part of their job.

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