MM: What’s history of search engine marketing—in terms of current practice and vendors as well as what you anticipate in the future?

BK: Search marketing evolved in the mid-to-late-90’s as the number of search engines increased and marketers saw an opportunity to influence the search results on these engines. Today search marketing is defined by a couple of categories.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), also referred to as natural search, is an effort by site creators to ensure the structure and content of their pages will properly “feed” the search engine spiders—so their company’s pages get top ranking. On most search engines, these results comprise the lower, left body of the results content.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), also referred to as paid search, is an environment where keywords are bid on for ranking. These results typically display at the top, left and down the right hand side of the search results content and most often have a shaded background and even a “sponsor” designation title.

In my experience SEO is handled by a combination of in-house personnel and outside consulting or agency expertise depending on the importance of search rankings and the volume of keywords an organization is managing. SEM, by contrast, is almost always handled by an outside agency and sometimes by several agencies, especially when the client markets to unique industries, product lines, and / or geographies.

However, Covario represents a firm that provides a suite of software to help companies audit the effectiveness of their SEO and SEM processes, bridging SEO and SEM to create a new category—or so they intend! As the volume of keywords under management increases, the need for automation becomes increasingly important and eventually mandatory.

My impression of future state is one where technical solutions, consulting and services will be imperative to successful attraction of site visitors. More and more social network services such as Facebook, will play a role in site attraction success so look for an ever-changing landscape.