What a difference a year makes. At last year's SIIA IIS many major publishers were uncertain as to how to play with Web search engines and considering how to retrench their content exposure via open Web searches. This year's panel of industry leaders demonstrate that it's not a matter of whether to use search engines to promote and position publishers' content, but how. Azhar Rafee, Global Head of Reuters.com, focuses on driving traffic to their own ad-supported site using search engines as a prime channel rather than to rely primarily on traditional channel partners. From this perspective each search result that includes your content becomes an aggregation that points to an individual article as an entry into the Reuters-branded news portal. "You can find a Reuters article, and that's a home page," Azhar notes. Luke Rattigan, Senior Vice President of Strategy for Reed Business Information, sees the importance in this environment of developing content with search engines in mind, concentrating on tagging content more effectively, and placing sponsored links in strategic locations throughout the web to bring high-value "click-throughs" into their core business content. The key from Luke's perspective is to generate qualified leads for their core advertisers: "Not all clicks are created equal," he notes, pointing out the importance of publishers moving from facilitating audience value through distribution to providing audience value via contextualization. Reed does this also through its own search engine initiatives such as KellySearch, providing a company and product directory with its own contextual ad schemes, creating its own content contextualization.

These models work not only for traditional media but for core business database content as well. Jim King, Senior Vice President for Business Operations at The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. provides deep content for verticals including, finance, construction, education and healthcare embraces the web search engines because they provide reach to professional consumers where they live their everyday lives. "We kid ourselves if we think that our clients are concentrating solely on our product," Jim notes. Yet this does not mean that the capabilities of search engines are going to replace effectively structured rich data. Jim gave the example of Google's Froogle shopping service, which can give business-oriented consumers a good idea as to what prices are on ceiling tiles but not data on how many times they've been used in specific kinds of construction projects. Yet interest in the tiles can lead to interest in the construction-oriented content as well, providing highly qualified leads. Jeffrey Herzog, CEO of icrossing inc. is one of the prime beneficiaries of this move by publishers, providing search engine optimization and search engine marketing services to publishers and other Web content sources. Jeff sees both search results and contextual advertising as key and complementary components in an intelligent marketing strategy for content: "One part is akin to PR, one is akin to advertising...the smart marketer wants to get visibility," and content should be no exception.

These are techniques that have been long accepted via other promotion and advertising channels, yet many publishers are still balking at the idea of building brand value for content through one of the most effective promotion and advertising channels available today. If somebody told a magazine publisher that there was a new kind of electronic billboard on a news stand kiosk that could show and ad for one of their articles any time somebody walked by looking for content of that kind, they'd pay unreasonable sums of money for placement on those billboards. Yet search engines are just that in a very real sense. More importantly the content product that more individuals seek is not a cover-to-cover content brand but content that fits specific needs at specific points in times, increasing the importance of "content in 'as is' condition" as Azhar Rafee puts it. Search engines as destination content allow relative brand transparency that helps to bolster the brands of the content supplier on an item-by-item level. When the aggregation that matters most to a content consumer is the aggregation that they choose via a search engine, publishers have no choice but to adapt to the contexts that matter most to them and use techniques such as this panel's leading suppliers have adopted.