In my previous post “Why You Need To Market Your Website” I mentioned the Web contains literally billions of web pages and millions more are added daily. Just how many is unclear.

Well a couple of days ago Google stated that their systems which process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone, recognising 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs! Note the word unique.

They go on to say “we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.”

What blows me away in particular is Google’s estimate that several billion pages each day are added. That’s just mind boggling & shows the growing level of competition.

To put this in context. The first Google index in 1998 had 26 million pages & by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. In my previous post I mentioned a study released in 2000 estimated 7.3 million unique pages were being added daily. I went on to say that given the huge growth of the web since 2000 & boom in blogging it’s likely the figure is now very much higher. Well I was right, but I’m still astounded at Google’s estimate. (I don’t dispute it – I just have difficulty counting that high ).

So how many unique pages does the web really contain? Google themselves say “we don’t know & strictly speaking, the number of pages out there is infinite with things like web calendars may have a ‘next day’ link, and we could follow that link forever, each time finding a ‘new’ page. We’re not doing that, obviously, since there would be little benefit to you. But this example shows that the size of the web really depends on your definition of what’s a useful page, and there is no exact answer.”

Let’s just agree there’s a lot & the number’s growing. Which means ranking well in search engine results is going to be more important than ever and more challenging to achieve.

Mark Sceats

Search engine marketing is the most powerful online customer acquisition strategy available to marketers today. More & more businesses are diverting funds from online banner advertising into search engine marketing because it’s cheaper & generates more sales.

If search engine marketing is not currently part of your marketing then chances are you’re giving your competitors a big opportunity.

Search engine marketing fits within the promotional mix of a marketing plan and is all about using Internet search engines to deliver targeted traffic to web sites.

The term “website traffic” is a bit abstract – what we’re really talking about here are visitors. More to the point, attracting prospective customers interested in whatever it is your website offers.

Search engine marketing has become increasingly complex and sophisticated. Today it involves much more than simply optimising page code. This is why the term “search engine marketing” or SEM has been coined. It encompasses all promotional activities involving search engines. This included search engine optimisation (SEO), paid search (PPC), search reputation management, and more. The simple diagram to the right shows the key components of search engine marketing.

However to confuse matters the term SEM is frequently used as an acronym to distinguish paid search from search engine optimisation or SEO.

Semantics aside, here’s what Search Engine Marketing is not…

1) “Search engine marketing is just about getting high rankings in the search engines”

Yes, high rankings in search engines are essential so your site can be found. But search engine rankings by themselves are not the end goal. They’re simply a necessary step to achieving it. High rankings in search engines are worthless unless they deliver visitors to a website. (Blindingly obvious, but missed by so many)

In this regard search engine rankings are like newspaper advertisements or billboards – their success is not measured by how many there are, but by the responses they generate.

2) “Search engine marketing is simply about driving increased traffic to your website from search engines”

It’s relatively easy to get vast amounts of traffic to a website, but if traffic just clicks in and clicks out again what’s the point? That’s like having lots of foot traffic go through a store but few stopping to shop. Tyre kickers don’t help your business.

What does help is getting more of the right sort of traffic. And that’s visitors who convert. In other words focus should be on traffic quality - not just quantity.

Done right, search engine marketing will deliver:

• Visitors actively searching for the products or services you offer

• Visitors wanting to buy

Exactly the sort of visitors you want visiting your website!

Mark Sceats

Hi, my name’s Mark Sceats & welcome to the SureFire Search Marketing blog. The SureFire team & I will regularly be posting topical articles here about search engine marketing.

But to kick things off here’s a quick bit of history about us. SureFire is a search marketing business I founded in 2002. Back then we were a lot smaller & also had a different name (Viz Marketing). I’m pleased to say the business took off & in 2006 we took on additional investors to fund growth to keep up with market demand for our services.

Last year we re-branded. We got a cool new look and changed our name to SureFire Search. However a long standing embarrassment has been getting our new website up – I guess a case of the bare foot cobbler’s children. My somewhat lame excuse is it’s because we’ve been far too busy doing search marketing work for clients…

Anyway at long last the site goes live today. My thanks to the great team here for making it happen.

Still a work in progress with some content to be added, plus cosmetic tweaks and optimisation. That will all be sorted out next week after Search Engine Bootcamp where we’re exhibiting and I’m speaking.

Cheers, Mark