David Fry, CEO of Fry Inc, discusses the importance of focusing your search marketing enhancement efforts on the site's internal pages, especially for catalogers and those which very large database driven sites.

This is not new, but as the former director of such a site, I can attest to the fact that it really is a pain in the ass. As Fry says. “If you want your users to be able to find a product from any page, you have to make it available from every page with some form of navigation,” he says. You can`t have the expectation people will go back to a home page or category page and find it from there.”

Navigation is one thing, and if your site is properly constructed, it's potentially low hanging fruit. The bigger issue for me has always been things like dynamic description tags, title tags, anchor text & cross-linking across a multi-thousand page site, and maintaining your sanity while all that stuff is going on.

A lot of these technicalities are grounded in having a well designed Content Management System (CMS) that's not designed only for "user friendliness" so that your admin assistant can be an instant webmaster, but also for the basic tenants of search marketing management. Even the once humble MovableType allows you to changeup Title tags by using the title of the post (which could be, also, the title of an article, the name of a product, service, or whatever you want) which aids significantly in streamlining your search optimization and marketing efforts. More to the point, CMS's can also make other search related elements like anchor text (build a database that cross links keywords found in any page to their category listings elsewhere in the site) somewhat automated as well. This can be done using some contextual advertising like tools, only on your own products. That being said, CMS implementations often fail beyond miserably so be cognizent of the reasons behind why content management fails [by Jeffrey Veen] before charging ahead

Search engine success is about marketing, optimization, and through it’s less frequently considered part of the mix, web site design, says David Fry, CEO of Fry Inc. “It has a big impact," he says.

Damn right it has a big impact. We were in a pitch the other day with a local firm and they asked about our search marketing capabilities. Without being too vague, I mentioned a lot of what I just said here. Which, in his eyes, was exactly what he wanted to hear. An interactive design director himself (with way more experience than me) know all to well that SEM cannot be an afterthought if it's one of the goals of in your interactive marketing strategy. On the flipside are these charlatans that come in with the "search engine marketing rate card" pitching you on how they can guarantee top 10 placement in any engine, including Google, which unless you're doing Adwords & Adsense, is "not for sale."

80% of the users on the Internet today use some major search engine to find sites and products, says Fry. “It used to be when you designed a web site, the first thing you’d focus on is what your home page would look like,” he says. But because search engines now deliver more shoppers directly to product pages, most major retail web sties now have less than 50% of their traffic starting at their home page, Fry says. Some, like Petco.com, have reported that as much as 80% of their traffic skips the home page.

“That means that all the brand equity and navigational elements and intelligence you put in your home page now has to be sprinkled throughout your site. The expectation was that people would follow this orderly path down through the web site, and you had the assumption that they were on a page having come from a previous page that gave some context to what they are seeing. That is no longer a certainly,” he says.

The design implications are that navigation has to be available on every page, and it must be crystal-clear, Fry adds. If a user comes to a site from a search on Google and lands on a product page, the merchant needs to have merchandising opportunities there for them. That goes the same for navigation, Fry says. “If you want your users to be able to find a product from any page, you have to make it available from every page with some form of navigation,” he says. You can`t have the expectation people will go back to a home page or category page and find it from there.”

The point is that so much of what retailers seek from search marketing is within their grasp, but it absolutely has to start with good design, and the site's goals need to reflect this. I know, basic stuff, but soooo many firms still blow these 2 steps. If your design firm doesn't do marketing, get marketing in the room with them to make sure that these details are considered. The best looking site is still a purple turd if it doesn't sell.

So, what happens when all of the people in an industry "get it" and all of the site's are perfectly optimized and competition is fierce? Never going to happen. Just like not everyone will ever have the balls to create a Free Prize:
(from the recent BBBT - on the subject of the Free Prize across an entire industry)

[Jeremy @ ensight] Q: Do you feel that if an entire industry were to 'get' the Free Prize and Purple Cow concepts that it would result in a saturation of these things?

[Seth Godin] A: Never going to happen. Not in my wildest dreams will a whole industry get these ideas. Even in ‘traditional’ fashion-based industries like toys and clothes, the vast majority of people are stuck in a web of boring, thinking it’s safer.

I do believe that once an industry starts getting really fashionable, the people who got in first (Armani) have an easier time staying out front.

So the books are really a call to action to get moving NOW before it’s harder to succeed with small efforts.

[Jeremy @ ensight] Editor's Note: Seth's right of course. There is no benefit to being immobile. Companies who pull back to what's safe, do only what they know, try what's worked in the past... Well, the world is littered with them. It's the Sony's, the Microsoft's, the Apple's, the GE's and the Virgin's of the world who are growing, succeeding and getting real attention, and for a reason: they are worth talking about. NOW.

And while we're on it, track this stuff once it's on the web, and don't rely on your log files alone, but use things like landing pages, special email addresses, unique URLs and search-specific 800 numbers.

[via Internet Retailer]