Search engine optimization, the art of getting your Web site to rank higher on Google and other search engines, involves constant monitoring and tuning. A new service from startup Yield Software promises to automate that work.Yield's SEO-as-a-service offering, in early testing by a few companies, is about to go into beta testing. Look for a formal announcement any day. When I talked to CEO Matt Malden a few weeks ago, he indicated the company was hoping to make its service generally availabile before year's end. Given the timing of the beta, however, I wouldn't be surprised if GA slips into the first quarter of 2008.

Co-founders Malden and CTO John Coker were formerly with Siebel Systems, as was VP of sales Jon Siegal. They're adopting the Salesforce.com software-as-a-service business model, but with an SEO twist. The idea is to make search engine optimization, and the related tasks of paying for key words and optimizing Web site design, a service that's performed 24-by-7 by Yield's algorithms running in a hosted data center. (Yield isn't building its own data centers; it's leasing capacity from companies in that business.)

Yield's service is really three services in one:

First, there's the search engine optimization, where Yield scans your Web pages for keywords associated with content, applies its library of best practices, recommends changes, and, if you want, makes those changes. Second, through graphic representations of what's hot and what's not on your site, Yield helps you understand how to organize content for increased effectiveness, i.e. page views. Third, Yield automates the process of choosing how to spend your marketing dollars on key words. Say you've got $5,000 a month to spend on pay-per-click key words. Yield will determine which key words will give you the most bang for the buck and on which search engines. A later version of this service will support pay-per-click banner and video advertising placement. Who inside a company might subscribe to Yield's service? Web site managers and marketing folks are candidates. In that respect, Malden compares Yield's offering with Omniture's Web site analytics service, though he says the two don't compete. Yield's service is aimed more at the midmarket than at Fortune 500 companies, which tend to have their own SEO specialists and online ad channels. WashingtonVC is an early investor. A second round of funding is pending.