In regard to the other major search engine companies existing today, I did not contact Yahoo, which recently purchased Overture (maybe for a future issue). The other big and highly regarded search engine companies I did not contact were MSN.com and America Online. Of course, there is a much longer list of search engine companies out there, including Lycos, HotBot, Netscape, Ask Jeeves and others that I’m not going to address here. However, one of the best places to learn about all of the major search engines can be found at SearchEngineWatch.com.

When inquiring about how to possibly get listed in search results without investing in a full-blown, cost-per-click, search engine marketing (SEM) program, I was informed that Overture uses the Inktomi search engine for finding and listing non sponsored results. Inktomi has a "Paid Inclusion Program" for ensuring that "the right page of your site appears at the right time on top Web search portals." Google, of course, uses its own proprietary search engine technology, which, in my opinion, is still numero uno.

MSN.com has partnered with LookSmart to enable you to add your Web site to its Web Directory, but there’s a $29 set up fee and a minimum commitment of $15 per month.

For information about some of the free services available for getting listed on the major search engines (see all the links at the end of this article), I suggest distance-education marketers start with the "Information for Webmasters" section of the Google Web site. Next stop should be Yahoo, which has a "How to Suggest a Site" section on their Web site that can help you obtain free non-sponsored listings in its search results. AOL’s search function at aol.com is tagged with the words "enhanced by Google" and is also noted as being managed by the Open Directory Project, which is a free service "run by a staff of volunteer editors who choose to evaluate and classify Web sites in one or more categories."

If all this is a bit too much, there’s submit-it.com, a well-known service provided by Microsoft’s bCentral, that does "Search Engine Submission, Keyword Research, Optimization Analysis, Rank Checking, & Link Popularity all in one easy to use system."

Google and Overture were more than happy to tell me about their search engine marketing (SEM) programs based on their sophisticated cost-per-click auction systems (see cover story). Both explained that the key to success in this arena is to make sure advertisers devise a solid list of relevant search terms to use inside their SEM campaigns. "The key thing is to choose the right keywords," said Google’s Fischer. "Really target your audience to whatever your specialty and niche is. Also, the way you write your ad text and what you are going to highlight is very important." For help in this area, Google and Overture provide great online tools within their SEM programs that show prospective advertisers which keywords are getting the most traffic.

Prospective Google advertisers also need to understand that Google uses an interesting process for determining where sponsored listings are ranked within its search results. Contrary to what one might think, you don’t necessarily have to bid the highest cost-per-click figure to get to the top of a Google search result. Here’s how it works: Google calculates the click-through rate of your ad, which is the percentage of times an ad gets clicked on in relation to the number of times an ad appears on a results page. For example, an ad that appears 100 times and gets five clicks has a five percent click-through rate, "which is very good," says Fischer. Google then multiples an advertiser’s cost-per-click fee times their click-through rate to calculate a ranking. "We use click-through rates basically as a proxy for relevance," says Fischer. "People will only click through ads generally because they want to read them. We encourage our advertisers to choose targeted and relevant key words, and we reward people for relevance. By doing that advertisers can actually be charged less. So if you have a five percent click-through rate and I have two and a half percent click-through rate, you can pay half as much as me and rank ahead of me because your click-through rate is higher."

Much of this relates to what the search engines claim to be the best marketing return-on-investment model in the business. "If you look at marketing data on the cost of getting a lead both online and offline, search engine marketing is by far the cheapest way," Fisher claims. "You can drive traffic and find customers in an incredibly cost-effective way." The Overture spokesperson echoed this claim.

CEO of Ed-X.com, the Distance Learning Channel, Mark Hall had this to say about investing in a SEM program with Google or Overture: "I think advertisers should be judicious in the key words they are bidding on and realize that what their ad campaign will cost them this quarter may go up next quarter. If you are trying to build an ROI argument, you have to look at the overall cost. Maybe you can get 100 clicks and out of those 100 clicks you have maybe 10 people who will fill out the form to get more information. Then maybe out of those 10 you have one person who perhaps becomes a matriculated student, and it is hard to track all this. You obviously can set up a spread-sheet analysis to determine what your ROI is, and what’s your break-even point, and when it is no longer judicious to be spending seven dollars per click. There might be another key word that is just as effective but less costly. I don’t think people should get into it without tracking the benefits, but it does seem to be providing good results."