To SEM or Not To SEM

Polarizing debates sell papers. Even if there are no papers. As I watch extremists from both the left and right trade insane and untrue allegations about Cindy Sheehan, my RSS aggregator leads me to a somewhat similar debate on SEM. In this corner, we have Jennifer August of Search Engine Guide, taking great exception to an article by Jack Humphrey on WebProNews. Jack says search marketing is snake oil. And Jack knows snake oil (more about that in a moment). My two favorite quotes from Mr. Humphrey: * The vast majority of small business startups will never have the resources, time, or know-how to turn an idea into a profitable online business focusing only on search engines. * In a well balanced marketing campaign that focuses on many ways to bring in targeted traffic, search engine marketing has its place. You do what you can, and you move on to all the other ways there are to promote your business. "You do what you can, and then you move on." Never has the manifesto of the loser been stated more clearly. Don’t bother finding out if what you’re doing is right. Just do something, and then move on. Don’t bother learning if there is something missing in your efforts. Do as much as you feel like, then move on. Don’t even consider that some things take time – and some things take a lot of time. Spend a little time, and then move on. Don’t assume that your efforts will need to be tuned and calibrated over time based on initial results. Give it a shot, and then move on. Of course, not everything Jack says is preposterous. He describes the hype in the SEO business and the ‘hammering of misinformation (that) never lets up.’ That’s true enough - as is the fact that nearly every paragraph in his essay is just more whacks of that very hammer. Lest I just sputter generalities like young Jack, let’s take on a few of his ‘points’: * You are led to believe that your business will die a terrible death without the search engines.

Search engines drive billions of visitors to web sites, and once most web sites attain position within the search results, that traffic represents the vast majority of their visitors. Saying that a site will die without search traffic is hyperbole, but saying that search engine traffic is potentially the best traffic source for most web sites is not.

* It is not long before a new business finds itself wrapped up in a game where the only winners are the geeks and deep pockets. If you do not fall into either of those categories, your business is doomed from the start if you hop right off the porch to play with those big dogs.

So geeks win all the organic search results, and deep pockets win all the paid search results, and you (assuming that you and Jack were separated at birth) are doomed. Except that unless your ‘new business’ sells Viagra, propecia, texas hold-em, or Paris Hilton DVDs a simple google search will clearly demonstrate that geeks aren’t winning all the search results. And I know ‘a dozen top quality companies off the top of my head’ (to quote Jennifer) that are making 4x to 10x return on paid search with far from ‘deep pockets’ from which they pay their Adsense bills.

* As people spam the search engines, they must adjust how they rank sites in order to compensate. This means a lot of good sites take a hit when Google changes the way it ranks sites.

Yes algorithms change. And undoubtedly some ‘good sites’ see their rankings change from time to time. But the overwhelming-vast-near-total-majority of sites that plunge into the abyss after an algo-update were gaming the system and got busted. Large content-rich sites with lots of natural inbound links don’t drop out – in fact they stay strong update after update.

And here we get to the best part. The little link below Jack’s bio says he is: “managing partner of Content Desk where publishers use cutting-edge site building software and tactics to turn content into cash”. Following the link provides the payoff – Jack sells ‘content’ (or more accurately it appears to be a content-stealing-via-rss system) to people who want to rank well in the search engines in order to get free traffic so they can earn money via contextually relevant paid-search ads (relevant to their store-bought content that is.). This is irony so thick you can taste it. Mr. ‘don’t depend on search engines for your business’ runs a business where he helps other people with no apparent skill or creativity to harvest the written work of others, feed it to the search engines, and then make money off of traffic the search engines provide via ads that the search engines sold. Just don’t waste your time on search marketing! Posted by Craig Danuloff at August 16, 2005 5:51 PM