The Search Engine Boom

(Direct Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge)Online marketers in North America spent $5.75 billion on search engine marketing of all types in 2005, compared with $4 billion the year before. And they're expected to shell out $11.1 billion in 2010, according to a recent report commissioned by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.

 

Where did the money go last year?

 

The lion's share, $4.7 billion, went for paid search advertising, in which companies' ads appear on results pages to match relevant search terms. Search optimization, which boosts a marketer's search ranking by tweaking its Web pages, may have been the most popular SEM tactic four in five respondents used it but it only got 11% of the total SEM outlay ($643 million) in 2005.

 

Paid inclusion, under which Web operators pay a fee to have their pages in an index or directory, made up 4% of all SEM spending in 2005, or $246 million, even though it's fallen into disfavor with all the major search engines except Yahoo!

 

The State of Search Engine Marketing 2005 contains the responses of 553 industry participants from search advertisers and SEM agencies. The study was conducted last November by Radar Research LLC and Intellisurvey.