You don’t have to have the biggest name or the most dazzling graphics to lure customers to your Web site. These days, all you really need is prominent search-engine placement. This book shows you how to get it! With searching one of the most popular Internet activities, a top spot on a major search engine virtually ensures a high volume of visitors–though converting them to buyers is another story. In these pages, top Internet marketer and strategist Catherine Seda tackles both…
Buy Search Engine Advertising: Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales at Amazon
Posted in 
Tags: 
Catherine Seda’s excellent book “Search Engine Advertising” is the perfect complement to Shari Thurow’s “Search Engine Visibility” from which includes an excerpt toward the end. Where Thurow’s book, the best one in terms of accomplishing high rankins in ‘organic’ (read unpaid) search results, Seda’s book brings along the whole other side of the equation: that of paid options to accomplish high rankings. In doing so, one of her key points is that Search Engine Advertising doesn’t end when the customer arrives at your site (visits), but it really is about conversions (getting the customer to make a purchase, subscribe or whatever your web site’s purpose is when s/he arrives to it).
The book is very well structured around six parts:
i) Planning: the key (yet sometimes overlooked) part of the process, to ensure you know who you are targetting and how, before jumping into the paid options.
ii) Paid Placement Programs: she presents the differences (pros and cons) of the most important fixed placement and pay-for-placement programs available.
iii) Paid Inclusion Programs: directories are presented here in all their splendor, along with what you can do to enhance your possibilities before submitting your site, and how to manage a large number of simultaneous submissions. Web site optimization is touched upon briefly at this point, but in no way substituting Thurow’s book on the topic: you simply have to have both, if you’re serious about Online Marketing at all.
iv) Specialized Search Engines: comparison shopping engines, vertical market search engines and international search engines are discussed in some detail, to get you started with them.
v) Tracking ROI: normally just as overlooked as the planning stage, the tracking of the results of paid advertising campaigns are discussed in extensive detail to ensure that you are able to steer the boat in the right direction if your ROI data shows that you’re putting money on the wrong key terms, your copy is not doing what it should to engage customers, or your landing pages are not taking customers where you want them to go once they get to your site.
vi) Protecting profits: topics such as click fraud, trademark infringement and affilate networks are discussed, as things to keep an eye on.
All in all, this is not a book you’d want to sit down and read in one afternoon (nor would you be able to). This is a hands-on book to work through and use as a reference as you’re getting your feet wet with this whole other animal that is paid advertising on the Web. It has done a ton for me in the two months I’ve been applying the concepts contained in it, since it summarizes very well all the options available to you, their pros/cons and how to best take advantage of them, considering your size and budget. I highly recommend it without reserves for eMarketers that have not had too much exposure to paid options, as well as those who have some experience in the area, since it provides a wealth of tips and insights that most people in the field can benefit from.
Disclosure: I received a copy for review from the publisher.
Catherine primarily focuses this book on the paid side of search engine marketing. I am a search engine marketer and have generally worked on the “free” or optimization side of search engine marketing for the past year. I also have read at least a dozen books or ebooks on this subject.
Generally I think the return on the optimization side is much greater than on the paid side, but if you are a savy marketer using paid search engine marketing can bring rapid distributions and returns. I personally have been amazed at some of the high profile, high frequency search words which have few competitors on the market (even today.)
There is much to know about search engine marketing, and much of the info that is out there on either side (paid or optimization) is chuck full of misinformation. This book is new and kept general enough (covering a rapidly changing environment) to where there is not a bunch of misinformation. She even predicted that paid inclusion would go to a PPC model right before Yahoo! put the new system in place.
If you have enough money to be participating in paid search then this book could help you save some of it.
I’m sure this book was cutting edge when it was first published in February of 2004, but now it’s for the most part outdated. For the absolute beginner to this area, there are some good general points, but references to long-since defunct or consolidated web companies (Urchin, Inktomi,etc) make it difficult to understand just what’s still relevant. Google and Yahoo (and soon Microsoft) are defining the new landscape of this field as we speak…Try the new book from IBM press, “Search Engine Marketing”….chock full of the latest (as late as can be in this field) info.