Before search as we know it, internet search engines seek help from Madison Avenue to find more users and advertisers. That's right, early search engines like Excite, Lycos and Yahoo! turned to big traditional ad agencies to find users.Over a decade and one huge role reversal later, users rely on search engines to find everything else.

And the most interesting turn of events is that digital agencies are poised to take the lead for major ad accounts away from the big boys on Madison Avenue. Brian Cross notes in his recent post Digital Agencies Are Taking the Lead that digital agencies, with a slight improvement in their overall strategy, are poised to overtake traditional agencies. He says about larger ad agencies:

"The hill is steep for them.  They are built into those old structures, and it's hard to break out of those.  These structures run deep, and no CEO blog and PR pitch that the agency is getting turned on to Digital is going to be the way to compete.  Something needs to fundamentally change."

Just last year - well after digital hit it big in the advertising world - ad executives at traditional agencies are scrambling, denying its coming, or trying to keep up in digital realm. 

"The digital age is bringing about fundamental changes in the way in which both the media industries and advertising agencies operate. The traditional broadcast and print media are having to reinvent their finance models in order to compensate for declining advertising revenues as advertisers chase audiences across the plethora of media platforms that are now available."

- Digital Age Transforming the Way Advertising Agencies Operate.

Not only that, but soon even traditional ad mediums will have the capability to be digital with the growing acceptance of HD Radio, Sattalinte or fiberoptic TV, even broadcast TV will be all digital in early 2009. It's not out of the question to think that all agencies will be digital agencies in the next few years.

IMO, that's not a bad thing for three main reasons:

1. Users have more control over what advertising they are exposed to.
2. Advertisers can plan and account for their marketing dollars more responsibly.
3. Targeting ads and marketing will be much more focused, so the ads we are exposed to will hopefully be much more relevant.

What is your IMO?

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Matt McGee at SearchEngineLand.com recently posted Study: Fortune 500 Doesn’t Get SEO.  The report suggests that a majority of Fortune 500 companies rank extremely poor in natural search for keywords that they heavily advertise on. 

"With very few exceptions our research found that Fortune 500 companies are doing an extraordinarily poor job of ensuring that their ‘money’ keywords are even moderately well represented in natural search."
- Natural Search Trends of the Fortune 500 Q3-2008, by Conductor, Inc.

Does this mean small and mid-sized companies have found a way to compete with - and outperform - the corporate giants?  In fact, the internet has leveled the playing field for companies of all sizes has been around for over a decade.  Many have considered natural search as the great equalizer for years, also.

But consider this: poor performance displayed by these large, sucessful companies is not necessarily due to incompetence.  I can think of one specific reasons that may explain the lack of visibility among large companies: lack of trying.

IMO, there is room for interpretation because of the 'money' keywords this report focuses on.  Forture 500 companies are spending money on these keywords with excellent results using search engine marketing, which provides much more controllable, trackable, and immediate results than natural search. 

And that would mean only one thing. Beware small and mid-sized compaines.  Once the Fortune 500 underperformers wake up and reach into their wallets to allocate the funds and resources to natural search optimization, we all may catch it right in the SERP.

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I taken on some new SEO efforts for three websites, and have two other sites that were built specifically for SEO within the last few months that I will begin working on soon.  Getting Google Sitelinks for each of these sites has always been a line item on my goal list.

Let me apply a disclaimer here: Although Sitelinks are on my SEO tasklist, Sitelinks do not affect your rankings in the search engines.  I am including it with my SEO efforts due to an assumption based on these givens:
1. Sitelinks are generated according to a Google algorithm when your site is spidered.
2. Google evaluates websites according to their perceived relevance to consumers.
3. SEO is all about showing the spiders how your site is relevant, and what keywords it is relevant for.

 So IMO, it's only natural to assume that a well SEO'd site has an increased chance of being rewarded with Google Sitelinks. That aside, I wanted them for the added access, usability and convenience for web visitors, and because Sitelinks make your listing stand out from all of the other results on the SERP.

So when I came in the office this past Tuesday and saw that Google had generated Sitelinks for one of my domains, I was thrilled... and perplexed  The site that is the newest domain and least optimized website for SEO within this current effort.  And the question that came to mind is this: Why does the Google algorithm to apply Sitelinks to some domains and not to others?

Cristian Mezei has compiled an excellent list of potential Google Sitelink triggers at SEOPedia.org about his testing methods and hypothesis on what does and does not affect Google Sitelinks for a domain.  Google only provides a bare bones description at How can I see links to my site?  (I can't imagine anyone answering "yes" to the 'was this information helpful' question.) 

Overall, there's little out there other than theories about Google Sitelinks.  But there's a little hope.  In a blog posting called Information about Sitelinks, Google says

Our process for generating Sitelinks is completely automated. We show them when we think they'll be most useful to searchers, saving them time from hunting through web pages to find the information they are looking for. Over time, we may look for ways to incorporate input from webmasters too.

IMO, it's time.

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