According to David Meerman Scott (Meerman, D. S. (2007). The new rules of marketing and PR. p.242) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the art and science of ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by the search engines and that once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural (non commercial) search results.
Internet marketing is the third largest media used to make advertisement in the United States. (Interactive Advertising Bureau. (2009). IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report.)
U.S. Advertising Market - Media Comparison – 2008 ($ Billions)
It is in constant growth since year 2002 and out of Internet advertisement:
Internet Ad Revenues by Advertising Format - 2008 Annual Results
Search Engine Optimization is the biggest activity of Internet marketing with 45%.
So SEO is a growing industry and it is one of the biggest channel of making advertisement.
Online marketing companies are offering as a service a position to company websites on the first page of search engine results.
And if we look at the statistics:
Search engine user behavior regarding results pages in the USA
We can see that very few are the users who go beyond the second page and year after year it seems that the vast majority is only considering the first page.
Statistics in other countries are confirming that almost no Internet users is considering results after the second page.
We can understand from here how valuable are the positions for marketing agencies to get a place within the first page of search engines.
It is scientifically proved that the eyes of Internet users are unconsciously giving more importance to some results.
Eye tracking is a technology which through a camera sensor technology detects the viewing of a screen by a person (Black box network services. (n.d.). Digital Signage: Glossary — Black Box Network Services.) and allow to put this into relevancy.
In the case of search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Baidu, Naver and MSN Internet users are giving more importance to the first results where they read almost entirely the information displayed (cf. Enquiro. (2008). Eye Tracking Studies.). We can observe some differences among Internet users (Chinese and Korean users seem to look almost all results) and search engines (Google users seem to stick only to the first three results).
An eye tracking study on several search engines
(Enquiro. (2006). Eye Tracking Studies: Eye Tracking Whitepapers from Enquiro Research.)
(Pandey, S. (2008). Top most search properties in Asia Pacific.)
(Hotchkiss, G. (2007). Chinese eye tracking study: Baidu versus Google.)
However in all cases Internet users are focusing more on the five results than the five others remaining. The colored parts are the ones where the eye focused where read is the maximum intensity.
The more a search engine is popular and the more marketing agencies will make an effort to be present in those positions. In the case of Google where the first three results are the most viewed there is then a high competition.
This is an issue because according to an American study (iProspect. (2006). Search Engine User Behavior Study.) 36% of Internet users agree that companies listed as the first results are the best ones in their field. But actually it is not, they just are better at advertising themselves.
Here it is quite obvious to see that such attitude make Internet users only browsing a tiny part of the World Wide Web. Moreover this tiny part of the Web is a battlefield marketing territory.
The risks are then to pick up for granted some commercial information or/and to use the same sources that everyone use.
Moreover this affect all sites for example companies may have an interest to promote themselves in an indirect way on websites well ranked, like writing an article on Wikipedia. (Cf. Zittrain, J.L. (2008). The future of the Internet and how to stop it. p.140)
Another example is given in the next part about the risk of sticking to the first results page.
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