President & Creative Director, Mays & Associates, Inc.
In the beginning, Bill Gates created the Operating System (or swiped
the idea from some unsuspecting genius as the story goes) and the PC
Universe was born. For awhile, things were calm, predictable and
dependable in PC Land. As things often are when the Kingdom of Redmond
is in charge. Then Al Gore invented the Internet and all hell broke
lose. And nothing was predictable anymore.
From the mid 90s until just recently, it’s been a wild, unpredictable
ride on the Internet roller coaster. Small businesses rubbed elbows
with Fortune 100 companies, and without reality’s “brick and mortar
filter” consumers couldn’t tell whether they were talking to a big
corporation or someone working out of their own bedroom.
Then along came a couple of Geek grad students at Stanford who
invented a sophisticated search engine that could actually separate the
virtual from the real, the big dogs from the pups, and the real business
ventures from the pretenders. Enter Google, swaggering in with
PageRank, the search algorithm to end all search algorithms. And
ushering in the Age of Reason and Science on the Internet.
With the advent of Google, consumers could actually search for
something on the Internet and find it at the top of their results list,
instead of wading through hundreds of web sites pretending to have the
right information. Plus, we’ve got a funky new word to put in Webster’s
Dictionary. Now don’t laugh too hard. Google may sound like a funny
word, but it’s not. It’s actually a play on the word “googol”, a term
which refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100
zeros. Google’s use of the term reflects the company’s mission “to
organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available
on the web.” In today’s fast paced business world, a company doesn’t
exist on the web until it’s been googled. Presently, over 60 percent of
all web searchers go to Google first when searching for information.
That’s pretty impressive market share for a company hatched in a college
dorm room only six years ago.
However, Google can’t afford to relax for a nanosecond. Yahoo, the
Internet’s original search engine and still a prominent player in the
search market is working on its own specialized search algorithm and
plans to give Google a run for its money. Unfortunately for the geeks
at Google, that’s not all. Microsoft has also decided to join the
battle for top of mind in search. Bill Gates understands that whoever
controls web search will wield vast power, something the Kingdom of
Redmond is accustomed to having (and not sharing).
For the time being, however, it’s still a Google world. And
businesses are scrambling to hire companies who can speak Google and get
high rankings on the web’s number one search engine. In fact, an
entire industry has sprung up to service those who are having a
difficult time getting googled. Companies specializing in SEO (Search
Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Management) abound,
developing search phrases and key words, registering web pages, and
optimizing those pages to fit the rules of the major search engines:
especially Google and Yahoo. The really sophisticated SEO companies use
software to monitor client websites, alerting them when web pages fall
in the rankings for critical key words and phrases.
Since Google’s not giving away any of its secrets, website
optimization and marketing is becoming a big business. To create and
maintain market share on the Internet, businesses are hiring specialists
to oversee optimization. Unless their current web hosting or web
design company specializes in SEO, this means finding a company that can
do the job. This doesn’t mean answering one of those outrageous,
grammatically incorrect claims that land in the spam inbox everyday from
the fly-by-nights (“We rank you company Numba 1 in all major search
engine, guaranteed”). It means spending the time to select a company
that understands your business, its marketing and online goals, and can
translate that know-how into an optimization program that will bring in
quantifiable results.
In fact, if you gather more than two geeks together, you’d be hard
pressed to get them to agree on the suitable method of getting properly
googled. Even if you agreed to give them a year’s supply of their
favorite flavored Pop Tart (that would be Brown Sugar Cinnamon according
to researchers), a gathering of the most exalted left brain-sided geeks
would not be able to agree on this subject.
So what are the right brain-sided creatives of the world supposed to do
now? Leave Pop Tart eating geeks in charge of Internet marketing? Not
on your life, Frodo. It’s finally time to wrestle the ring of marketing
power away from the left side and bring it back into the light of
creativity and reason.
But alas, this is not to be. In their infinite wisdom, the Internet
Gods (most people now realize that this is not Al Gore and a couple of
his college buddies) have declared that web marketing will now require
the deployment of the complete brain, the left “analytical” or geek side
and the right “visionary” or creative side. After all, one of the keys
to optimization is leveraging the correct key words for a particular
business or industry (the words a customer is likely to use when
searching for a particular product or service). That’s a right side
skill set. Geeks write programming script not marketing messages.
As you can see, the Internet is turning out to be a pretty incredible
place. A communication medium that levels the playing field for
businesses large and small, creates new communities of individuals, and
builds collaboration and teamwork between professional specialists from
every walk of life. Now the final question remains. Can left-sided Geeks
and right-sided Creatives work together to unravel the mysteries of the
Google Page Rank algorithm to optimize corporate websites? Perhaps we
should just lock them in a room, give them an unlimited supply of Brown
Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts and hope for the best.
Ken Mays is President & Creative Director of Mays & Associates, Inc., (www.ad-mays.com)
an innovative web hosting & design firm based in Columbia,
Maryland. Mays develops high impact creative strategies for print,
television, radio, interactive, multi-media, and the Internet. Ken is an
award winning writer and designer and can be reached at 410-964-9701 or
ken@ad-mays.com.