Digital Marketing > Search Engine OptimizationEssentials

You can't simply open a new Web site, sit back, and expect to welcome a horde of visitors showing up at your virtual storefront. If you want your online business to be successful, you must promote your site.

You're the CMO of a company that makes blue widgets. But when you enter the phrase "blue widget" in a major search engine, your Web site pops up in the 4,500th spot on the results list. Talk about a visibility problem: A study conducted by The Pennsylvania State University, published in 2003, found that 54 percent of users review only the first page of search results, and 19 percent stop after the second page. Clearly, poor search engine ranking is costing the company business. The remedy? You can't write to Google or Yahoo and ask them to please, pleeeeease rank your site higher for "blue widget" searches. Search engines use complex, secret and ever-changing mathematical algorithms to rank sites. To improve a Web site's search rank, marketers can turn to search engine optimization, or SEO.

If there's one place where Microsoft and Google have reversed reputations, it's at a search marketing conference.

Web 2.0 has come to search engine optimization. Or rather, search engine optimizers have discovered Web 2.0.