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This presentation was given to LifeScience Alley on Thursday, June 26 2008. It was a great opportunity for us to talk with those in attendance about Search Engine Optimization, Paid Search Advertising, and how these strategies influence the biomedical marketplace.

You can also download the presentation in Powerpoint or PDF format.

The consensus in the search engine optimization community these days is that meta tags are dead, dead, dead. It is widely thought that most (if not all) search engines place little direct value in meta tags as a sole path to high rankings, and many webmasters and SEO practitioners often advocate not wasting time with meta tags as a part of a search engine optimization strategy.

In the immortal words of Susan Powter - “Stop the insanity!!”

Meta tags are not dead. In and of themselves, meta tags do not offer the bang for the buck they once did. But they are, and should continue to be, an integral part of every comprehensive search engine optimization strategy.

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Often times search engine optimization specialists will spend a great deal of effort trying to research and choose the right keywords for their optimization strategies.

After optimizing the keywords, code, content, and plethora of other on and off-site elements, the fun begins! The strategy is rolled out and ranking analysis takes over. Depending on how often/frequent the engines spider the site, chances are that the hard work has paid off and ranking improvements follow.

Being the ever vigilant search marketer, we know that ranking high does not always equate to higher volumes of traffic. So, turning to the analytics tool of choice, it’s evident that some of the newly acquired rankings are driving higher levels of traffic.

At this point, the cycle begins again. Research, implement, measure. Or, as we like to call it - wash, rinse, repeat.

After a few more wins (more high rankings, and increases in traffic) and several more wash, rinse, repeat cycles, you’ve made some gains, but the big breakthrough has yet to appear. What next?

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comScore has released its latest search engine rankings for April 2007. Not surprising, Google continues it’s march towards search dominance, moving up 1.4% from the previous month to 49.7% of all US internet searches.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft’s search sites declined slightly, as did Ask’s rankings. It will be interesting to see how Ask’s numbers move (up or down) as they move forward with their “algorithm” advertising campaign here in the US.

comScore Releases April U.S. Search Engine Rankings via [www.comscore.com]

Yesterday Google announced its Universal Search initiative, which integrates search results from all of Google’s web properties and projects into the main search results page of Google.com. Instead of only seeing text-based search engine results or having to go to the separate portals for image, news, or video search, users will now be seeing the most relevant results for a search query regardless of its format. So, searching on Steve Jobs will not only bring up the most valid text-based search results, but you’ll also see images, news snippets, and video - all embedded within the standard search results listings.

Lots of feedback on the announcement throughout the Internet. We’ll be following up with further posts of the ramifications of Universal Search later.