"Everything you need to know about search engine marketing"

I listened to a Web seminar on search engine marketing and it was extremely interesting. A Shar VanBoskirk from forrester.com spoke on they key elements of search engine marketing and how it could be improved. A few of the key elements of search engine marketing VanBoskirk discussed included establishing a persona through the marketing, applying direct marketing smarts to ad copy, thinking of search marketing as a science, and many more. She also discussed the types of searches out there; vertical search which helps people buy by filtering out unrelated content, social search which weeds out all content and focuses solely on the searcher, and personalized search which bases the results on a survey about the consumer.

I thought that many of the search engines discussed in the seminar were very clever and extremely interesting, especially the example used for personalized search. VanBoskirk discussed a Web site which surveys the buyer and generates custom jeans for them. I think the most important point in the seminar is that search engines must be targeted to a specific user and should take a database approach to understand who the customers are.

Another interesting part of the seminar was a diagram depicting what percent of people use which search engines and where they overlap. The diagram included Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. The main point of it was to show that many people use multiple search engines, therefore audiences can be reached across a multitude of search engines.