Epiar has only been around for 6 years, but their impact has been felt tremendously throughout the industry. In an interview with Webpronews at the SES conference, we caught up with Epiar President, Ken Jurina; Managing Director, Damian Finlay; and Account Manager, Curtis Dueck; to talk about their company. Epiar is a marketing firm that offers search engine optimization services to companies that want to increase their leads, sales, and brand visibility online. They help companies better themselves by defining their market, wants, and needs. They do this by collecting data from many different sources. The secret to their business is combining data and finding useful meaning of it.Ken Jurina explained to us how their key word research application works. It allows them to sort through hundreds of thousands of key phrases at an overwhelming rate of speed. Epiar’s ability to accomplish this has given them, as well as their clients, a competitive advantage. With all these applications and developments, Epiar is able to provide organic optimization of websites.Up to this point, Epiar’s work has been organic, but very successful. Many people wonder why they do not deal with paid searches since they spend their money on managing key words, tracking conversions, and things such as that. According to Damian Finlay, Epiar is looking into paid searches since other companies are planning on outsourcing to them. With all the thousands of key phrases plus the collection of costs-per-click, the budgets are too appealing not to consider paid searches.Marketing for the year 2007 requires both online and offline aspects including strategy building, maintaining inventories, and all sorts other day-to-day business affairs. According to Curtis Dueck, search needs to be incorporated into a marketing mix. Marketing includes having effective research and having knowledge of what the market is looking for, but these factors are also important when adding search to the mix.In other devel...