By EncinoMan

Woody Allen once observed that “Ninety percent of success in life is showing up.” Nowhere is this truer than on the Web: to make a lasting impression, people have to first find your products, content and/or ideas. In practice this means that you will either persuade people to visit your site or you will place your content out on other sites where it will be seen. In practice, you would want to do both.

Having a recognized brand definitely goes a long way on the Web. If you’re Apple or Amazon or the New York Times, people already flock to your website with expectations of what they will find there. But even if a brand is a household name, there is no guarantee that it will be top of mind when people jump online to find the information they need. That’s why the most successful companies have given a lot of thought as to how they are going to “show up” on the Web.

Marketing on the Web is a different (some would say better) proposition as compared to traditional marketing and advertising. Compare and contrast: classic advertising is based on the idea of diverting someone’s attention from the article they are reading, the program they are watching, or the route they are driving; and getting that person to consider your message instead. It’s essentially about interruption.

On the Web, a large part of marketing a product, service or idea is about figuring out what information your audience is likely to be searching for and then ranking high on the list of search results. There are two ways to make this happen:

  1. By optimizing your Web content so that Google and other search engines list it on the first or second page of results. Not surprisingly, this approach is called “search engine optimization” or SEO, for short.
  2. By “sponsoring” specific words or phrases your audience will likely use in searches, essentially buying a visible spot (in either the right hand column, or in a shaded box above the “natural” search results). This approach is called “search engine marketing” or SEM.

We’re used to this approach in the realm of consumer goods, but SEO and SEM are useful for all kinds of products and services. Take the example of a financial services firm is looking to promote its investment brokerage or mutual funds. How can these approaches help them show up near the top of page one?

The first step is to adopt the motto of search marketers everywhere: “Think and search like your customer.” We would expect the customer to Google something like “investing for retirement“. Plug those words into Google and notice who shows up on page one. Toward the bottom are links to New York Life and Wells Fargo. Let’s view the Wells Fargo page to see how they attained that position. To do this, we’ll highlight the word “retirement” wherever it occurs on the page.

Note that the magic word “retirement” not only occurs multiple times on the page, but it frequently occurs in headlines, bolded text and within links. This is not a chance occurrence — this page was clearly optimized to show up for this phrase. How do we know? Look at the page title at the very top:

Notice a recurring theme? The word “retirement” appears along with “investing” in both the page title and even in the web address. This page didn’t show up on the first page of Google’s results by happenstance, it was no doubt optimized with the search “investing for retirement” in mind.

Why that specific phrase? Because a search for that phrase returns over half a million results, which searching for “investing” returns 115,000,000 results and “retirement” yields 111,000,000 results. In this case, more is not necessarily better. Since “retirement” is so general it is not as targeted, so the odds that your carefully optimized page will show up near the top of the search results drop significantly. The key to successful SEO is to target relevant search terms that reflect the customer’s mindset, while keeping them focused and targeted so that it is possible to show up on page one or two of the search results.

So who else shows up in a prominent spot on page one? Those who went the SEM route and paid for sponsored links. These are the links that show up in special areas either above or to the right of the “organic” results Fidelity uses this approach to buy its way to the top of the heap.

These approaches are not just for marketing to consumers, they also work well in the B2B space. Google “IFRS” or “Sarbanes Oxley” and see who comes up on page one of the search results, then note who is paying to show up in the sponsored links areas.

The advantage of SEM over SEO is that if your organization is willing to bid for the keywords and phrases you want, then you can show up first when people search on those keywords and phrases, assuming you are one of the highest bidders. The disadvantage is that you receive fewer clicks and bidding for keywords can become expensive, so you need to decide which keywords and key phrases you are willing to pay for.

On the flip side, the advantage of SEO over SEM is that you pay nothing to Google or other search engines. Rather, you put your time and money into creating pages that will show up high in the results naturally. The disadvantage is that it takes time to move up in the search results, and you’re at the mercy of each search engine in terms of how credible and relevant it sees your page.

The two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but rather complementary, and should go hand-in-hand. In both cases, you define a set of targeted keywords and search phrases, then optimize to achieve a good placement, not only in Google, Yahoo and the other search engines. This process takes time, so buying a prominent placement via SEM is a good way to fill the gap. Even after their pages achieve a strong placement, companies may still find it worthwhile to maintain SEM campaigns because there is more control over what appears and where visitors go when they click the link.

SEO and SEM are not new strategies. Both have been with us since the early days of Web search, and their use has exploded with the meteoric rise of Google. Yet companies often ignore these approaches, or use them inconsistently at best.

And now, with the advent of social networking and social media, including online communities like MySpace and Facebook, news aggregation sites like Digg, social bookmarking sites like de.licio.us, and millions of blogs, there are countless new ways for organizations to show up, and new PR strategies that leverage social media. Stay tuned.