• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, August 27, 2001

According to a study by IMT Strategies of consumer and business e-mail users:

- 45.8% cited search engines as their top method of discovering new web sites.
- 20.3% said word-of-mouth
- 19.9%, random surfing.
- 2.1% by accident
- 1.4% newspapers
- 1.4% television
- 1% Banner ads

Meanwhile, a report from CyberAtlas Research shows only 10% of the marketers surveyed spend more than 25% of their marketing budgets on increasing their visibility on the Web, and 46% said they allocate less than 0.5% of their annual marketing budgets on search engine optimization.

The report, "Search Engine Optimization Strategies: A Marketer's Perspective," finds that:

- 24% of those surveyed said that 75% or more of their traffic came from search engine referrals
- 25% said that less than 25% of their Web traffic originates from search engines
- 13% of those surveyed do not know how much traffic they got from search engines and online directories.
- 85% said they audit their search engine listings monthly or more frequently
- 7% said they never monitor their site placements in search engines
- 65% of respondents perform Search Engine Optimization activities at least monthly, and 13% weekly

More than 30% of the firms surveyed have utilized paid participation programs. The majority of marketers using these services said the best results are produced by targeted marketing programs that leverage select keywords, because these programs increased the volume of relevant traffic to their Web sites.

Read the whole story here.