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MIAMI — Industry leaders got a look at a whole new way to get their companies’ message across to their target audience at the Furniture/Today Leadership Conference here.
It’s search engine marketing, using the Internet to drive business. The idea is to get prospective buyers to your Web site.Explaining how was Niki Fielding, president and CEO of Kingston, N.J.-based Digital Brand Expressions, a search engine marketing company founded in 2002 to provide technological advice to Fortune 500 and fast-growth middle-market companies. Speaking to an audience that indicated it was mostly unaware of search engine management, Fielding said there are two basic ways to draw customers — search engine optimization and search engine advertising.
With optimization, Fielding said, the idea is to provide key words that entice search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask Jeeves to put your company into the engine’s free listings on the left side of the search engine page. The higher the positioning, the better. The more “hits” on specific words — “furniture,” for example — the more the search engine will “start to see there’s a lot of activity around your site” and give a company’s listing more prominent positioning. “And more visibility leads to more sales,” she said. In constructing Web sites, beautiful visuals are great, but to optimize the chance for a good search engine listing, a company should have a “below the fold” text of 200 or so words that could attract attention from Google or Yahoo, Fielding said. “You have to balance the technological and design considerations,” she said.Fielding also said it’s important to have other Web sites linking to yours.“There are lots of ways to do this, but make sure you’re using practices approved by the search engine,” she said. “You want to work with other companies not competing with you that have your target audience and ask them to link to you. But you don’t want reciprocal linking, because Google (and other engines) will look at that like you’re just getting links to get the rankings.”Search engine advertising, the other way to promote a Web site, refers to sites listed on the right side of the engine’s screen or in banners across the top. Companies pay for placement, bidding for locations on a per-click basis for each keyword. While “click-throughs” typically range from 10 cents to $50, depending on the category, costs per click for the furniture category averaged 63 cents in October, she said. Search engine optimization is more cost effective than ads, according to Fielding, but ads are more immediate because it takes up to four months for sites to “kick in” on engine listings. But Web visitors tend to give more credence to the unpaid listings than to the ads, she added.Fielding said that according to Web statistics for October, the term “furniture” attracted 2.1 million Web searches during the month. “Bedroom furniture” drew 498,146, “modern furniture” 85,580, and “chairs,” 220,370.Among industry brands, Bassett attracted 85,730 hits, Thomasville 81,006, Lane 61,290, and Broyhill 53,312.“If people find your Web site and have a good experience, they’re going to buy from you,” she said.
