Online Optimisation

Terms of art and three letter acronyms abound in what might be seen as an attempt to obfuscate, confound, and befuddle.

Channelling Human Creativity
The first thing to say is that the internet is uninteresting. It is merely a very sophisticated network of computers spanning the globe.

What is interesting is the myriad ways that humans have found to express themselves in it - social networking sites, shopping sites, corporate megasites, blogs, vlogs, forums, IRC channels, Peer to Peer networks, 24hr news sites, radio stations, and so on - the internet is an ever expanding human playground of creativity - for the developed world at least.

For the business world, the internet provides unparalleled opportunities to reach new and existing markets across the globe in new fast, efficient, and more profitable ways. For these companies, understanding online optimisation is a crucial component of getting and staying ahead of their competitors, and fully capitalising upon the opportunities the internet affords.

Online Optimisation: A Taxonomy

Online Optimisation
Online optimisation is about improving the interface between human beings and the complex of machines which is the internet. At present, the boundaries of online optimisation are set by the main technological components of the world wide web - search engines, websites, and hyperlinks. Online optimisation is about maximising the efficiency of these components to secure human time, interest, and (economic) activity.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engines have become the great gatekeepers of the internet. They wield an immense influence providing not just the means to access the fruits of human creative expression, but also in ordering, ranking, and governing ease of access to this information. (At present, the search engine algorithms determine the priority of websites against a range of keywords and phrases.)

Search engine marketing is the area of online optimisation which focuses upon leveraging the power held by search engines to govern access. With an estimated 40% of all internet traffic originating from the search engines, top spots on Google (as the presently ascendant search engine) means sites can collect the lion's share of visitors, while pushing into visitor obscurity those sites which cannot be found.

Search engine marketing is made of two components - paid placement marketing (PPM) and natural search marketing or Natural Search Optimisation (NSO).

Paid Placement Marketing (PPM)
Paid Placement Marketing governs the purchasing of adverts on particular search engines. These so-called 'sponsored listings' are normally separate from the organic or natural search results and account for about one-fifth of all links clicked on Google, etc. This form of paid-for listing is often described as Pay per Click (PPC) as the advertiser literally 'pays' the search engine each time their advert is clicked.

Natural Search Marketing (NSM)
In contrast, natural search marketing relates to the so-called organic listings - the search results arising in the central area of the search engine results page which arise purely as a result of the websites/pages success in terms of the search algorithms of the respective search engines. Success in these organic rankings is largely, though not entirely, a question of technical compliance with the search algorithms.

Debate rages over which of these two forms of SEM is most effective in terms of drawing the right sort of visitors at the right price to websites. What is clear is that they each have their own advantages and disadvantages - so it is perhaps 'horses for courses' here.

Intermediary Site Marketing
Of course, the search engines are not the only source of human visitors for websites - though they might be the largest source. The hyperlink has created a whole network - a world wide web - of interlinked websites and pages along which human website visitors can travel. And the more popular a site is with folks, the more visitors it has, the more it can pass these visitors to other sites.

So, recently, social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are attracting visitors in their millions and each of these sites can guide many of these visitors to other destinations on the web.

For many companies, these social networking sites become crucial 'intermediary sites' standing in the gap between their intended audiences and the corporate websites they wish to promote.

Website Optimisation
The final element in our taxonomy of online optimisation is website optimisation. This has little to do with search engines, and even less to do with technical solutions. Website optimisation is about optimising the human interaction with a website - finding ways to draw folks to interact in the way that the website owners intend.

Much of this optimisation occurs through traditional marketing processes and procedures of customer identification and profiling, and then translating these insights into the imagery, text, and visitor paths of a website.

Website optimisation is an ongoing process as the models of interaction upon which the site is built are tested by the actual interactions evinced in by the web metrics. As such, website optimisation is a task that is never complete as new objectives, audiences, and interactions are constantly being tested against the real world of human interaction. Increase the number of times that people satisfy an objective that you set by just 5% can have massive repercussions on the return on investment arising from the website.

Conclusion
Of course, there is more to be said. This taxonomy doesn't describe the place of email marketing as a form of online optimisation, nor does it describe in any detail the peculiar character of human / internet interactions - so you can see what 'optimisation' might actually look like. Yet, I hope it gives some shape to the seemingly endless discussion of PPC/SEM/SEO/NSO and other acronyms, and helps you find your way through the fog.

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