If there is some company out who harnessed the power of SEO to build up its Internet presence, it has got to be J. Crew as reported on the New York Times. US First-lady-to-be Michelle Obama appeared on the Tonight Show, and was asked by Jay Leno for the budget for that night's outfit (allusions of Sarah Palin's alleged spending spree). But the light moment ended in favor of J. Crew, which was thanked by Mrs. Obama. The company seized the casual on-air promotion and sculpted it into a just-add-water type of marketing program.



J. Crew did its own Internet Marketing by snapping up for a price ?Michelle Obama? keywords on Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, ?built a page on the jcrew.com Web site that promoted her outfit (a $148 pencil skirt, a $148 yellow and brown tank top and a $118 yellow cardigan), and told call-center representatives how to handle queries about Mrs. Obama's fashion.? J. Crew has refused to divulge the sales amount generated in this campaign, but they are said to be nonetheless ?pleased.?

So what is Search Marketing anyway? Like what J. Crew basically did, it is a style of marketing trying to make the most of the general behavior of most Internet users, which is to look up information on a major search engine such as Google or Yahoo! Search.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), despite the fancy name, is actually one of the many methods for effective search marketing. This so-called natural method concentrates on the techniques need to effectively boost the search engine ranking of your website in the ?natural? search engine results. In the example of J. Crew, what the the company was aiming for was its presence in the top 5, or top 10 search engine results whenever people look up keywords related to the new First Lady on the Internet.

But this ?natural? scheme asks for the prerequisite that you ?optimize? all of your web content (e.g. put the brief keywords you wish to associate with your site all over the text of your site) to spike up the chances of your website appearing within the ?Natural? Search results. So-called search engine ?spiders? or ?web crawlers? are responsible for visiting your site, at least once to make snippets of the most important keywords appearing on your site. This information is then stored, and will be brought up on once more when people search for that keyword.

The significance of SEO, as we have emphasized, is that the closer you are to the top of the search results page, the more traffic your site will receive. Moreoever, it is said ?80% of people? never click anymore to see the second page of rankings; thus their attention is focused on what appeared only on the first page. Lastly, people are begiinning to rely more often on the Internet for the information they need, for example, getting their ?news? directly from Yahoo/Google search engines, as well as traditional means.

So when are you going to stop being left behind, and instead use SEO to further your business?