Study: big brands slow to adopt search engine optimization.

A new survey of Fortune 100 companies reveals that relatively few of them make a serious effort to optimize their Web sites to receive high search rankings on Yahoo! or Google.

The study, by the search engine optimization (SEO) marketing firm OneUpWeb, is the company's third finds some increase in the number of big names using SEO to get better natural search results: OneUpWeb detected that 13 of the Fortune 100 are expending a lot of effort to optimize their pages, compared to nine last year and only three in 2002. Another 45 are making "moderate" efforts to elevate their natural search results. But 42 of those top corporate names are taking no steps to make sure their Web sites appear in the top organic results of any search engines, according to Lisa Wehr, CEO of OneUpWeb.

"SEO just has not caught on to the degree we expected among the top companies," she said. "It's not that they're trying to optimize and failing; it's that many of them are not even trying." She predicted that as many as 20 of the Fortune 100 might have well-optimized Web sites a year from now -- "but that's a generous assessment."

She attributes this failure to a number of factors. For one thing, these big brands may assume that customers are searching for their Web sites using their brand names as keywords. Research suggests that's not true, Wehr says; a lot of buying research begins with generic terms, not brand names.

These top brand names may also find it simpler to buy either placement in search results pages or pay-per-click ads than to take the many programming steps involved in site optimization for search.

"Ironically, this survey may be good news for mid-range companies competing with these brands," she said. "If you can do search optimization well, you stand a good chance against these big names."

(Excerpted from DirectNewsline 5/24/05)