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The search sector has changed significantly over the past three years as has the public and advertisers’ perspectives on search engine marketing. Just four short years ago, there were several important search tools, all of which were primarily algorithm-based, producing results based on elements found on the page or site. The only notable exceptions to this rule were Yahoo and LookSmart, both of which were live-human edited directories. Back in the days when AltaVista, Lycos, AlltheWeb, Netscape/AOL, Excite and HotBot were considered relevant, “search engine optimization” was the key, descriptive business term and model. Today, there is really only two search tools with massive public import, Google and Yahoo, and only two primary means of getting your client’s message to the viewers, organic and paid. That’s not to suggest the dozens of extremely good search tools out there don’t exist, but the fact remains we live in a universe currently dominated by two major celestial bodies sharing space with a number of smaller bodies, (some of which will cluster into larger bodies), and a heck of a lot of space junk. Now if you want to have an interesting, albeit, lengthy conversation, ask an astrophysicist about Sir Issac Newton and his three laws of motion. Newton’s three laws are the concepts that dictate all objects are subject to forces applied by other objects in their vicinity. These laws apply to bowling pins, football players, Jupiter’s moons, and, by both natural and algorithmic reasoning, search engines.

There are two dominant types of search results targeted by marketers today, organic listings and paid advertisements. These are two very different subjects, though both are covered by the term “search engine marketing” and both are serviced by most good search engine marketing firms. Organic listings are the “free” listings generally displayed as text-links with small descriptions in groups of ten. Paid ads are generally displayed in three ways, as links above the organic listings and as text-boxes to the right of organic listings on a search engine, or on other documents that relate to the subject of the advertisement. It is important to note that organic search engine optimization and paid-advertising management are unique sectors of search engine marketing and only directly relate to each other through the use of keywords or keyword phrases and by the fact that both are products of search engines. Paid advertising is much more fluid than organic optimization and moves at a much faster pace. For that reason, this article addresses organic optimization first and paid advertising second. Both organic listings and paid-advertising are heavily influenced by other (off-site) forces found around them. As far as off-site factors go, most can be related back to Newton’s laws of motion.

Organic Results
The first influential force, competition, is an obvious assumption with a number of not-so-obvious realities that need to be considered. The rank of a site under a specific keyword or keyword phrase is influenced by the number of other sites competing for placement under that phrase. The more sites competing at Google or Yahoo, the more difficult it is to get the Top10 ranking. That’s the obvious part. Less obvious is the state of competition found at other places on the ‘net, including directories, newsletters, forums and blogs. One of the most important functions of the Internet is access to information from a wide variety of sources. For online retailers, a sale is a sale, regardless of how the customer came to find the product. Your competition likely knows this and may posting articles, advice and opinions, each of which serve to market the product (or producer), and have influence on Google and Yahoo’s perceptions of their site. Since we know both Google and Yahoo use link-density as a rank-influencing factor, incoming links from other areas or sites on the web are extremely important. Researching and observing how your competition uses other web-based properties to support his or her rankings should give you and your marketing team ideas on how you can use similar properties to support your own. In this way, Newton’s first law of motion applies. If your competition is using it, you are often compelled to at least consider using it as well.

The second influential force, link density carries the most gravity at both Google and Yahoo. Link-density refers to the number of links pointing to your site from other sites on the net. Simply put, the more incoming links you have, the better your site will place. When thinking about link-density, think about Newton’s second law of motion, the one which explains how the velocity of an object changes when it is subjected to an external force. The mass of both the object and the external force are factors in calculating the effects of this law. In this case, we’ll replace the word MASS with the word TOPIC or THEME and the word FORCE with LINKS. The effect of links coming to your site is judged by the relationship between the topic of the object (your website) and the topics of the websites linking to yours (collectively referred to as force). The closer the relational theme, the better the link, in theory at least. The more links from sites with similar topics, the greater the force applied to a page or site and the better the rankings for that site. This is where wise use of directory listings makes a major difference.

Notes: Both Google and Yahoo have their own ways of factoring what is and is not relevant to the topic of a site and Google is supposed to have much stricter means of measuring relevance. When changes are made to Google’s ranking algorithm it is usually the value of incoming links that gets tinkered with. Yahoo seems to base its rankings more on on-page-factors than Google does, but it does consider the number and quality of incoming links as a measure of relevance.

Lastly, an influential force that needs to be considered is pop-culture. The various influences of pop-culture are multi-faceted but directly influence how and why people search for information or products. This is especially true in the fast paced world of paid-advertising but has an effect on organic listings as well. The December/January holiday season for example, is the most important retail season of the year. The rate of gift and travel searches will gradually and rapidly increase in volume, peaking two to three weeks after the US Thanksgiving in mid-November. Another example was the rise is searches for body jewelry in the two weeks after the world was subjected to Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction. Sites with good placement under keyword phrases relating to gift giving will see a fairly massive increase in business in the coming weeks, just like sites featuring body jewelery saw an up-tick in visits from a suddenly (and temporarily) interested public. When it comes to calendar dates, pop-culture’s influence on search can easily be anticipated and factored into an organic search-marketing campaign. Search engine users choose words and terms for a number of reasons, some of which are more difficult to determine than others. Sudden events or stunts on the other hand are obviously more difficult to predict though a wise observer can read various sources such as TV Guides and tour-schedules, as well as keeping well abreast (so to speak), of current events.

Paid Advertising
While organic search and paid-advertising are different galaxies sharing the same universe, the same basic laws apply. Searchers define their search terms by what interests them and competition drives much of the decision making in the sector. The competitive environment in paid advertising can be extremely intense. With the advent of contextual distribution of paid listings, it can also become extremely confusing and expensive. With placement determined primarily on how much one is willing to pay for each click generated by a paid-ad, there are several forces that will effect the trajectory and velocity of your online advertising results.

The biggest difference (aside from cost) is that the application of Newton’s laws is influenced by the first major force of paid-advertising, the hyper-accelerated atmosphere of contextual-content distribution. Most first-time advertisers don’t understand that their paid-advertisements, by default, will be distributed across thousands of sources besides the search engines themselves. Almost every paid-advertisement program, including market leaders Google AdWords and Yahoo’s subsidiary Overture, have a contextual distribution program that sends the first few paid-results to other sites that show topic-relational text. For example, a paid-advertisement for a resort in Kissimmee Florida might appear beside an article about voters in Osceola county Florida. That same ad might also appear in an article detailing the effect of hurricanes on the economy of the state. It might also appear in my Gmail box when corresponding with clients from the Orlando area of Florida. Since there is no real way to know how many sites your ad might appear on or when, it is very difficult to predict long-term costs of pay-per-click campaigns or the competitiveness of those campaigns against your competition. You can however, measure against yourself and improve your ad copy based on click-through rates. Paid-advertising gives marketers the ability to instantly react to external forces within minutes so this type of experimentation is relatively easy and the risks of experimentation are greatly decreased.

The other major difference is the costs of paid-advertising, both legitimate and illegitimate. The cost-per-click model encourages a rapidly fluctuating range of top bids under competitive keyword phrases. Bidding battles are not uncommon with sometimes outrageous results. Currently, there is a bidding battle playing out amongst a group of class-action lawyers over the keyword phrase “Mesothelioma” (a cancer related disease caused by asbestos exposure) with the maximum bid at Overture being over $100.00 per click! For retailers in a competitive business or season, rising costs can be a major influencing factor. Another is the specter of click-fraud. Click fraud is sometimes cited as being responsible for up to 25% of billings from pay-per-click campaigns. Both Google and Yahoo are trying to combat click fraud but with legions of spammers trying to make money anyway they can, click-fraud is a reality advertisers need to consider when trying to calculate approximate costs. There are several tools that allow advertisers or pay-per-click managers to watch click-through-costs and react quickly if out-bidded or if they detect fraud. To avoid most pay-per-click problems though, consultation with a good pay-per-click SEM firm is strongly recommended.

Know your universe
In order to fully understand the various forces that will influence the velocity of your website’s rankings, you need to fully understand the laws and properties of the galaxy your site exists in. Several SEO firms offer a full competitive analysis detailing state of the various forces effecting your placement in the searchable universe. StepForth Placement CEO, Ross Dunn has developed a model that worked well for Time magazine. I recommend it simply because I have read his report on Fortune.Com and know that his model covers every client-specific contingency he could possibly think of. In today’s world of search, having a good grasp of your site and it’s competition is crucial for long-term success and is the best way to provide constant upward motion for your site.

Ironically, the job of your SEO is to break Newton’s most famous universal law, that of gravity. In this case, what goes up does not necessarily need to come down.