Web Promotion – When? and Who?

E-commerce has finally proven its commercial significance. Another Internet boom is on the verge, will it crash again? Internet popularity has reached a new dimension, partly because of the improvements in search technology (Google Rocks!) but also because of the availability of cheaper broadband. Consumer confidence has improved dramatically, people are more confident about buying online, even my dad has a new credit card with a very limited credit limit for use on the web. The business world is again awakening to web opportunities and this is leading to a boom in E-commerce driven business re-engineering.

It is apparent to all web marketing experts that web promotion techniques such as search engine optimisation need to be considered in the initial stages of the design of all systems that feed to a website as well as in the design of the website itself. Example: imagine a book shop that wishes to go digital and challenge Amazon. It planes to do this by providing a niche service offering exotic and rare books. To facilitate this it will need to provide objectively written book reviews, as well as photographic quality assurance for the rare books. Any Internet marketer will immediately notice the marketing relevance of the book reviews. If they are properly optimised they may act as portals for all sorts of interested browsers who would never even have heard about the availability of such books. They would also note that the pictures need to be of low resolution not to slow the system down too much, and that they would need to be labelled strategically - to maximise SEO (search engine optimisation) relevance. They would know how to design the site to rank better on search engines, and how to build a web promotion campaign for the keywords that they select with careful strategic considerations.

However management consultants are traditionally brought in to advise on the construction of such systems - and so they should be. Redesigning business models for e-commerce is not mearly a technical project - it needs to incorporate business sense within it. The whole organization would need to change, business processes would need to be redesigned, resistance to change would need to be managed. Web promotion experts have many virtues but managing complexity is not one of them.

Inductively management consultancies need to incorporate web promotion techniques into their advisory practice – but have they done this? My gut feeling is no! How else may one explain the huge amount of unsuccessful e-ventures (most of which use flash!), and that only few big companies manage their web presence through effective search engine optimisation? Recently BMW got black listed by Google because they re-engineered various pages of their site to rank high for keyphases like “used cars” – this is testimony of their ignorance in search technology.

Management consultancies, I think leave these matters to their more technical web development staff, but unfortunately web design schools themselves do not give search engine marketing the importance it deserves. More over, without dedicated search marketing personnel any SEO knowledge within the organisational will erode extremely fast.

The world is craving for academic literature about search engine marketing, so that these techniques may be incorporated into MIS and Web Design Courses not only for better consultancy services but also to feed better social scientists to Google in order to aid it win its war against irrelevant results!