Creating SEO-friendly content can be a daunting task, but it’s the only way to make your website popular. Search engines rank your websites according to the quality of your content, therefore, it’s important to be relevant.

It works the same way for content marketing – the creation or sharing of content for the purpose of engaging current and potential consumer bases.

If your website has a decent  SEO, not only will search engines love it, but they will give it a higher ranking compared to non-optimized pages. What we try to tell marketers is to keep in mind SEO and content work hand in hand.

With the current social media explotion, it might be the case that some of you may be forgetting the importance of good content. In a social media strategy, good content means content that is engaging, easy to read/digest and incites people to leave comments and share it with friends and colleagues. Add to that rich keywords and phrases that appear naturally within the text and your content will be taking you places you’ve never been before.

Experts talk about a certain density for keywords in order to improve search engine rankings- that is- an average of 3 to 7 keywords for every 100 words. We advise you use Google’s Keyword Tool to help you choose the most relevant words for your website with the highest amount of monthly searches and the lowest amount of competitors.

Here are some of the factors we recommend you keep track of while developing content for your website:

* make it engaging

* frequency of updates on your website

* placing your target key words in positions of prominence

* using your target words in everything that you do that is related to your site

* keywords in meta tags and descriptions

* relevancy and quality of your content

The more relevant and valuable your content is, the easier it will be for those interested in your product or services to find you on the web.

One small bad review will make an organization look terrible, and no matter how much effort a company puts to rank first within the top positions in Google, Bing or Yahoo, the negative content will still show up. Even if just one negative content appears anywhere within the SERPs it can still damage a company’s reputation.

To avoid such content from invading the SERPs, a company must dedicate a lot of time and effort to build up its positive presence on the result pages while at the same time pushing the negative content below the fold.

One way of doing this is by using social media. Establishing your company’s presence in recognized social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn can efficiently help reduce the negative results.

Another way is by blogging on a regular basis. Aim to publish one page blog posts on a regular basis about your company’s products or services and the benefits of buying them. At the same time, you can try to establish relationships with the press as well as bloggers in order to score a potential article or blog post that could help build a good name for you.

Lastly, another good solution is link building. Linking your company’s name or specific keywords between different social media profiles, blog posts and any good review you’ve obtained about your organization can also help increase your rank on the different search engines.

Online reputation management is vital for your organization to gain a priviledged position on the SERPs. Like I said, it takes a lot of time and effort to build a good reputation online. However, keep in mind that the more information there is available to readers, prospects and customers about your organization, the easier it will be to eradicate the bad press and generate good results for your online marketing strategy.

It might still be too early to tell how Bing’s new rich-media search feature will affect marketers and their ability to be found online.

However, it’s gone live and it’s working. The new Bing Visual Search feature that displays search results in a grid-like image gallery instead of the traditional list of search results, was announced yesterday at the TechCrunch50.

What’s the concept behind Bing’s Visual Search?

To display simple, clear imagery to help users sort through lots of data easily. Of course you might agree that certain categories of search might find this more useful than others. So far Bing has only launched the new feature in beta (bing.com/visualsearch) which only works for a particular set of categories: cars, animals, people and products.

As explained on Search Engine Land, users must have Silverlight installed on their browsers to fully experience Visual Search. Also, statistics from Rich Internet Application show that nearly 73% of users have Silverlight and its adoption has been growing fairly quickly since NBCOlympics.com relied upon Silverlight for live streaming and on-demand video coverage during Beijing 2008.

The newly launched feature only works for 50 different categories and it is said Microsoft will be adding a new category every month according to what they believe is a popular search result.

So how do you get your product out in the grid-like image gallery?

AdvertisingAge explained Microsoft gets the information from data providers like Zappos or PC World, for digital-camera information, for example.

‘Thus, to make sure your merchandise pops up in Bing’s galleries, make sure you’re present in the feed of more than one industry heavyweight.’

According to the data firm StatCounter, Bing, which was launched on June 3rd, took 8.23% of U.S. Web searches in June, up from 7.81% for Microsoft search just prior to its rollout and 7.21 percent in April.

Interestingly enough, though, Google has gone through a slightly slow period since the launch of the new engine, from 78.72% to 77.48%, considering this to be the first time ever Google loses share to Microsoft.

Bing’s success, according to Microsoft, is attributed to its technologically advanced features. The world’s first decision engine, as they brand themselves, looks to provide users with a lot more information on the search results page, without requiring its users to click through to external sites. Also, it clearly excels in some everyday areas like travel, shopping, images, competing head-to-head with Google.

As pointed out in Affari&Finanza, Repubblica’s finance supplement, Bing is looking to fill the gap left by other traditional search engines like Yahoo! and Google. According to a research by Microsoft, 42% of Yahoo! and Google users are not satisfied with the results which then forces them to redefine or reword their queries. Only 25% of the clicks generated seem to be successful.

Although not all of Bing’s first month positive results are thanks to its meticulous engineering, Ballmer has commented Microsoft plans to spend a sweet $80 to 100 million in marketing and advertising campaigns, compared to the $25 million Google put aside for the same purpose.

As of now, we can’t really say Google’s users are switching over to Bing and making that their exclusive search engine, however, and as the previous numbers show, users are definitely willing to explore alternatives and test other options.

“If nothing else, it will at least get people to realize that Microsoft is in this game and that there is an alternative to Google…”

Bing has come out swinging and is currently experiencing more buzz than Live Search ever had. With what appears to be a good product, and an aggressive advertising campaign against Google ($80-100 million), Microsoft looks poised to cement its role in search as the ‘decision engine’.

Based on the assumption that Bing is successful in increasing Microsoft’s stake in the world of search, one benefit that instantly comes to mind is more competition for Google. Overall, this makes the web a healthier place. More specifically, though, this would make advertisers less dependent on Google Adwords. This potential tilt in scales would force Google to listen more carefully to the needs and wants of brands, advertisers, as well as users.

For example, as of June 4th, marketers are officially allowed to bid on competitor’s trademarked terms to trigger display of sponsored search ads on Google in about 200 countries. This has concerned many brands because it has driven up the cost of keeping paid search ads for brand keywords in top positions next to organic search results. In what Google is calling a pro-competitive move, advertising costs are being driven up without much retaliation. If Microsoft, which does not allow bidding on trademarked keywords, held a larger percentage of searches than advertisers would have an alternative and Google would have to think twice before making a move like this.

Google has already reacted to the release of Bing by adding a link to its home page that says, “Discovering the web“, that takes the user to a page outlining Google’s numerous search features. It’s a nice feature which highlights various search functions that many users may not have known about. But it took some pressure from Bing for Google to apply this.

Furthermore, Google has recently been criticized for its move to request and display work from top artists without paying for it. Google’s argument was that they will be giving the artists so much exposure that they should not have to pay for the art as well. The simple fact is Google is a healthy company that pulled in a staggering $21 bn in global revenue last year. There is no need for them to save a few pennies at the expense of hard working artists. This just highlights the greedy and expansionist attitude that has grown on Google without a significant competitor.

Bing’s success would, in turn, most definitely be a good thing. A healthy dose of competition could be exactly what Google needs. Last week, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft would be willing to spend 5 – 10 percent of operating costs (or $1.12 – $2.25 billion) a year over the next five years on search alone.

Not only may Google have a serious search competitor on their hands, but evidently, one that has both determination and very deep pockets.

Wikipedia defines Wolfram Alpha as an online service that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, instead of providing a list of documents or web pages that might contain the answer.

Wolfram Alpha’s creator, Steven Wolfram, both a physicist and software developer, who not only received his PhD. at the age of 20 but who has also launched one of the most powerful computational software in its field, Mathematica, is quite clear his invention will not be stealing marketshare from Google, especially at the early stage in which it is in.

The new engine is actually quite simple. It follows basically the same Google principle in that you type in your query in a small input box, however, results are rendered differently. While Google’s results provide users with pages and pages of links and recent articles related to the searvh query, Wolfram Alpha plots out a single answer for you.

Not only that, the engine also offers the most accurate calculations from questions such as the number of vertices on a great rhombic triacontahedron (182) or what gene is 456 base pairs upstream of another given gene, as explained by Bryan Bergstein from the Associated Press.

To give you an idea of what it looks like, this article on ReadWriteWeb displays a series of screenshots containing the different results generated by the search engine according to the different queries, ie: Oakland, California.

Along the same vein, the comparison run on MIT’s Technology Review between Google results and Wolfram results is also very interesting to look at as to understand how the engines both rationalize data in their very own ways.

And lastly, I will leave you with this video containing Steven himself presenting a sneak preview to Wolfram Alpha:

It seems like no search engine we’ve seen, including this one, comes close to making the quantum leap in performance required to get Internet users to switch over from one engine to the other. But then again, it’s too soon to tell. Differences however, are quite obvious; Google is an engine that provides its users with a list of relevant webpages which eventually lead you to the information you’re looking for, whereas Wolfram Alpha is more about presenting quantified numeric data and data comparisons.

The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) from the Russian Federation has finally put its foot down on the Google-Begun deal as anticipated in our previous article.

According to the press release (for the moment available only in Russian) on the official site of the FAS, they have received a request from a privately-owned limited liability company KOKUNA HOLDINGS LIMITED to buy out 100% of Begun’s voting shares.

Having examined the documents that were presented on October 22, the FAS governed by clause 5 of part 2 of article 33 of the federal law “On Protection of Competition” has decided to decline the petition. This clause allows the FAS to refuse to satisfy petitions in case the deal leads to “restriction of competition including such as in the result of emerging or strengthening of the dominant position of the applicant…and if in the process of examination of the submitted documents the anti monopoly authority finds that the information contained in the documents and significant for the decision-making is unreliable.”

As a reminder, back in July 18th, Google had signed an agreement with Rambler Media to purchase Begun for USD 140 million, agreement which was due to be completed in Q3 of 2008 and was supposed to go through the normal procedures on registration and approval by the regulatory authorities.

To conclude, I have to say I deeply regret not having made a bet with my optimistic colleagues with regards to the final verdict…I knew this deal wouldn’t go through. It could have been an easy win compared to playing the Superenalotto!

In July, Google agreed to buy for $140 million 100% of the company Begun, Russian contextual advertising company, from the UK-registered Rambler Media Ltd., operating one of Russia’s most popular internet brands Rambler. The parties had planned to complete it before the end of September, however due to skepticism on behalf of the FAS (Federal Antimonopoly Service) regarding the final transaction, the negotiation was postponed to October 22nd.

And this is where things start to get really interesting: a source close to Begun claims that the “story has acquired a political connotation”. Allegedly, the administration of the president showed signs of discontent about the deal last summer and went even further, suggesting the shareholder of Rambler, Profmedia, a company owned by Russian millionaire Vladimir Potanin, to revoke the transaction.

Vedomosti, Russia’s business newspaper, referred to a source familiar with the management of Rambler saying that the Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin did not approve on the sell-out of a Russian company to American Google, which -by the way– is co-founded by Moscow-born Sergey Brin.

Earlier, a senior state official was quoted saying that the state considers major Internet companies as relevant information resources. The state was said to be looking for a “coherent co-investor” for Yandex, the leading Russian search engine. Begun is Yandex’s main competitor in the contextual advertising arena and holds a total share of 20.2% compared to 64% from Yandex. If the Google/Begun deal gets approved, the joint share of Rambler and Google in search queries will amount to 30% against 56% Yandex alone.

The online advertising market in Russia is booming: it has been estimated at $260 million in the first half of 2008, a total 73% increase compared to the same period in 2007, according to MindShare Interaction.

No wonder, the Begun deal is so juicy…

Not for Google though, the search monster has instead maintained a visitor growth rate of 1.6% between June 2008 to July 2008 according to Hitwise. Currently it holds a total market share of 70.77% amongst all leading search engine providers in the US.

Following Google, not so close behind is Yahoo! with 18.65% of searches in July 2008. Coming in third is Microsoft who suffered a loss of 3.43% since July 2007, with a total share today of 5.36%.

Research also showed the categories which received the most traffic from search engines and the list goes something like this:

Health and Medical

Travel

Shopping & Classifieds

News & Media

The top three categories which under the highest between July 2007 up to July 2008 are Online Video, Social Networking and tying on third place position is Sports, Business & Finance and Entertainment. To be as expected for 1 & 2, wouldn’t you say?

We know Google has clearly established if not the most powerful and recognized brand in the history of online marketing. At least if anyone were to mention the word internet to me, the first thing that pops in my mind is Google, and I’m sure I’m not the only one out there (except some really old or vintage individuals who haven’t transgressed into the modern world yet).

I’m going to have to agree with John Battelle, ‘Google is the most impressive and important development in the history of marketing since the invention of television.’

Funny thing, they’ve grown to be what they are, where they are and secured a spot in people’s minds without much marketing. Its what’s particularly impressive. And you’d continue to think Google does not need to market itself in order to get more business. And why would they, if they’ve done such a great job up to now.

Truth is, the search colossus has not been fully blindfolded by the whole internet euphoria, instead its managed to deposit some faith on old school advertising, like Outdoor ads, to continue boosting its brand. This really caught my attention.

The moral of the story is, if Google feels the need to advertise, so should everyone else in this world!

Then, as I kept browsing the net, I found another article, on TechCrunch, which reinforced Google’s reasons to advertise at all. And it makes perfect sense that Google would want to spend 250k/month on approx. 5,000 outdoor ads in order to gain search market in Russia, until eventually defeating the all-timer local champion Yandex, as displayed in this comScore report. As a result, Google needs a push when it comes to established and close-knit markets such as Russia’s, where users are pretty much settled with their local search provider and don’t need or are oblivious to the fact there’s something else available.

And to wrap up, I just wanted to comment this is not the only step Google has been taking in order to leverage its business. The latest idea to monetize YouTube, as AdvertisingAge explains, is to let content creators sell ads. Why? Because being the largest video site doesn’t necessarily equal $$$. So by allowing content producers to sell advertising on their YouTube channels, the revenue is split between the creator and YouTube.