Creating and building effective search engine marketing campaigns is like trying to nail Jello to the wall for many companies, as it typically involves deploying very specialized processes and melding them with technology. Here is some insight gained from years of experience providing these services to our own clients.

• Search engine marketing works and drives low cost return on investment - over 85 percent of most surfers utilize search engines to find goods and services.
• It's a zero sum game if you use any of the "we submit to thousands of search engines" service companies, as these submissions do absolutely nothing to drive viable rankings. If you aren't achieving positions in the top 20 to 30 listings, then you're wasting your marketing dollars.
• Remember the old Hill St. Blues maxim "Be careful out there"? This advice applies aptly to the search engine marketing world - it's digital warfare out there for rankings. Significant resources are starting to flow into this market as well, raising the bar and making it fiercely competitive.
• Stringent keyword analysis of your HTML text is the underlying foundation of a successful search engine ranking campaign - it's analogous to the importance of ad copy to a conventional print campaign. Most good search engine firms use a commercial database service that enables them to carefully analyze the relative popularity of keywords and then build a submissions-and-optimization process around selected keywords.
• The actual title of your pages will also have a significant impact on whether or not a campaign works. It needs to be the right length, typically six to eight words, contain no hyperbole, and pique a searcher's curiosity.
• Contrary to endless marketing hype, there are no quick solutions in this form of interactive marketing. It will take at least one to two months before you see any immediate results. And, for significant results (i.e., page 1-3 listings via top tier engines) add on average another two to three months on top of this.
• Nobody can guarantee absolute results in this market; if they do, then ask for a bottle of snake oil! The only things we can guarantee our clients are detailed reports of what we are doing and some references to other successful campaigns - it's a leap of faith, like most marketing expenditures.
• Web site content development impacts good search engine rankings. You need to develop content that is relevant to keywords. We use linguistic analysis software for our clients and then build a standalone "stealth Web site" that has content expressly designed for search engine spiders (bots), the software that scans documents and adds them to an index by following links. This level of sophistication and proprietary process is expensive and time-consuming, but very effective.
• Remember the Armand Hammer quote about Russia? "An enigma wrapped inside a box buried deep in the ocean." This is apropos to the search engine world, as the top tier search engines all change their submission rules and algorithms on a regular basis. So, hire a firm that understands the market - doing search engine marketing on your own can be very frustrating, and in many cases unproductive.