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| Thursday November 16, 2006 |
Today's keynote featured the lyrical stylings of Danny Sullivan, whose decade-long observation of the search engine industry has been a fixture of his blogging and conference sessions. WebProNews settled in for the story.
Danny Sullivan will be a free agent soon, his long-time association with Search Engine Watch coming to an end, to be followed by his departure from the Search Engine Strategies conference series. He announced during the keynote that he, Barry Schwartz, and Chris Sherman would begin writing about search on a new website. "Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Land" launches on December 11th.
Those who may have been a little surprised that he would keynote a rival conference learned how much he respects the work done by Brett Tabke at WebmasterWorld and PubCon.
He spoke respectively of his hosts, and credited them with being an influence on the search industry. They coined the phrase "Google Dance," which many of our readers will recognize as the times when Google performs an update with its index. Sullivan said that when things go wrong in search, WebmasterWorld is usually the first place to find out about them.
Sullivan also credited Tabke and company with influencing the formation of Sitemaps.org. The new site will be jointly supported by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft and will encourage webmasters to use sitemaps to help search engines index their sites best.
He remarked about the state of search by discussing how it has become confused in the mainstream media with search advertising. Some in traditional media disdain contextual ads, rating them just above classifieds in appeal.
(The impact paid search has had on the fortunes of print media empires in particular, by being a measurable ad medium, probably has a lot to do with this perception among the mainstream media. - David)
Even though the media equates Google with advertising, ads are not search. Sullivan noted very directly that search is now a fundamental marketing medium.
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It may be too fundamental for some marketers, who complain about SEM not being friendly to brands. Search marketing is not about brands, though; Sullivan said it is about providing an answer to a query. A searcher seeks, and a search ad and organic results deliver.
The confusion for brand marketers probably rests in the idea that search is a reverse-broadcast medium. Sullivan noted that the searcher broadcasts a desire through a search engine, and is served with a response. Think of SEM as a yellow pages directory to get the idea.
He carried the reverse broadcast metaphor forward, in likening the major search players to being key "desire broadcast" stations. Search marketers understand how to feed and optimize the messages shown on those stations.
Those SEMs scout the location, write the script, and deliver the result on request when the searcher broadcasts that desire.
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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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