Page 234 - Electronic Commerce

Marketing on the Web

index that match the site visitor’s search terms. The visitor can then click the links to
visit those sites. You will learn more about the technologies used in search engines in later
chapters of this book.
Some search engine sites also provide classified hierarchical lists of categories into
which they have organized commonly searched URLs. Although these sites are technically
called Web directories, most people refer to them as search engines. The most popular of 209
these sites, such as Yahoo!, include a Web directory and a search engine. They give users
the option of using the search engine to find categories of URLs as well as the URLs
themselves. This combination of Web directory and search engine can be a powerful tool
for finding things on the Web. Nielsen, the audience measurement and analytics
consulting firm, issues press releases that list the most frequently visited Web sites.
Search engine and Web directory sites regularly appear on these lists.
Marketers want to make sure that when a potential customer enters search terms that
relate to their products or services, their companies’ Web site URLs appear among the
first 10 returned listings. The weighting of the factors that search engines use to decide
which URLs appear first on searches for a particular search term is called a search engine
ranking. For example, if a site is near the top of the list of links returned for the search
term “auto,” that site is said to have a high search engine ranking for “auto.” The
combined art and science of having a particular URL listed near the top of search engine
results is called search engine positioning, search engine optimization,or search engine
placement. For sites that obtain most of their visitors from search engines, a high ranking
that places their URL near the top of the list of links returned by the search engine is
extremely important.

Paid Search Engine Inclusion and Placement
Today, a number of search engine sites make it easier to obtain good ad placement on
search results pages—but for a price. These search engine sites offer companies a paid
placement, which is the option of purchasing a top listing on results pages for a particular
set of search terms. A paid placement also is called a sponsorship or a search term
sponsorship; however, these search term sponsorships are not the same thing as the
general site sponsorships you learned about earlier in this chapter. The rates for paid
placements vary tremendously depending on the desirability of the search terms to
potential sponsors. For example, a search term such as “rental car” would likely be more
expensive than a search term such as “frictionless ball bearing” because the potential
audience for rental car advertising is much larger than the number of people interested in
a specialized industrial product like ball bearings.
Another option for companies is to buy banner ad space at the top of search results
pages that include certain terms. For example, Chevrolet might want to buy banner ad
space at the top of all search results pages that are generated by queries containing the
words “new” and “car.” Most search engine sites sell banner ad space on this basis. An
increasing number sell space on results pages for the most desirable terms only to
companies that agree to package deals that include paid placement and banner ad
purchases.

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