Old but interesting news

I've spent a fairly big chunk of my pro­fes­sion­al career building public websites for a number of clients. One of the things that comes up again and again is search engine op­ti­mi­sa­tion.

Sur­pris­ing­ly there is very little coverage of this is in business and marketing journals. Patrick Reid wanted to start raise awareness, and needed my technical help in preparing a paper. We finished it up earlier this year and it was published in the Journal of Strategic Management Education.

Corporate Com­mu­ni­ca­tions in the FTSE 100: Evidence using Search Engines
JSME Vol 7: Issue 1, 2011
Patrick Reid (Greenwich School of Management, UK), Brian Lyttle (LiquidHub, Inc., USA)

Search engines have become an essential tool for in­for­ma­tion seekers on the world wide web. This makes it critical that company websites are optimised to achieve the highest possible ranking across the major search engines, in particular Google, ensuring maximum exposure and subsequent awareness. This paper identifies key factors in search engine op­ti­mi­sa­tion and then analyses a sample of the largest 10 firms listed on the London Stock Exchange.

The findings reveal a lack of adoption of best practices which will impact on their search rankings. The paper also discusses tradeoffs inherent in search engine op­ti­mi­sa­tion and draws out key im­pli­ca­tions for managers and academics.

The full paper is available from the Senate Hall site.

Tagged with marketing, search, search-engine-optimization, sem and seo.