Now your brand has a bigger chance of getting discovered on the Web thanks to those journalists who are using search and social media as sources of information for their stories.

As reported on guardian.co.uk, a recent US survey has revealed that an overwhelming majority of reporters and editors use social media sources for researching as 56% say social media is important for reporting and producing the stories they wrote.

Another good reason why you should bring your business online!

The survey which was conducted by Cision and The George Washington University, found that among the journalists surveyed, 89% of journalists use Blogs, 65% use Social Networking Sites, and 52% use Microblogging Sites to research information for their stories.

Such results demonstrate the fast growth of social media, how it’s spreading and how it’s also being exploited by journalists and editors not just brands and businesses.

In addition, it’s an eye opener for companies and marketers who are still skeptical about turning to the Web as an alternative and complimentary strategy to market their brand or products.

Now more than ever, marketers should strongly consider using tools such as optimization or activities such as participating on social networks and posting good, relevant content online as to make their information more accessible, and easily traceable to journalists who can then feed themselves with data originating straight from the real source.

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.

45.4% of respondents worldwide considered social networks and applications a ‘top priority’ for 2010, while 42.2% found it ‘important’. Following closely were digital infrastructure, search optimization and mobile with 44.5%, 27.0% and 26.8% of respondents who considered these as their biggest priorities for this year.

However, an important fact that ties along with these findings is that senior marketers are not only allocating their marketing budgets to social media, they also want to see measurable results from their social initiatives.

According to a study from MarketingProfs which interviewed almost 5,000 marketing pros, almost all CMOs declared they’d look to increase their social media activites to engage customers, measure ROI and reach new audiences.

Findings also reported these marketers will execute the following activites during this year:

* A 400% increase in use of Twitter comments to inform decisions about products and services
* A 59% increase in use of customer reviews and ratings
* A 24% increase in use of social media for pre-sales Q&A

Some predictions from CMOs say social media will have an impact on revenue in 2010 and these are:

* 80% say up to a 5% impact, and 15% say a 5-10% impact

* Most companies (81%) plan to link annual revenues to their social media investment in 2010

Of those companies that did tie social media investment to 2009 revenues here are some of the outcomes:

* Companies with 5% or less revenue tied to social media in 2009 foresee that the link between revenue and social media will increase 5% or more in 2010
* Those with 6-10% of revenue tied to social media in 2009 project that the link will increase more than 10%
* Those with higher than 6% of their revenue linked to social media in 2009 foresee that the link will increase more than 20% in 2010

More findings from to the study from eMarketer revealed that respondents (27.9%) considered time spent online as the most important performance metric, followed by unique page views with 23.7%.

Are you looking to engage with your customers and allocate more budget to the digital space? Discuss.

A vast number of brands have already adopted and harnessed many of the digital marketing tools to communicate, engage and interact with customers and prospects to establish a solid online presence as well as increase awareness and build brand image.

Among the list of top online strategies that were mostly used in 2009 were:

*Social Media- Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube: Used to engage with customers on a personal level, interact with brand followers, friends and loyalists more directly. This strategy also helps increase brand awareness and generate a lot of buzz about a product or service.

*SEO/SEM: Used to achieve a high ranking on the SERPs and to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search result pages. The higher the position on a page result, the higher the probabilities of people clicking on your website, knowing about your brand or product and generating a higher ROI.

*Online PR: Used to generate positive buzz around a brand or product. Word of mouth is one the most powerful forms of communication and can greatly influence people’s opinions and consumer purchase behavior.

*Email Marketing: Used to send useful information as well as offers and discounts about a product or service. It is also a vehicle that helps obtain a continuous flow of new business contacts and users who are genuinly interested to your products or service.

*Paid search marketing: Used to bid on keyword phrases relevant to the brand or product. Its highly measurable and helps maximise your return on investment.

*Link Building: Used to build a brand’s credibility. It’s a fundamental ingredient to get a brand’s website higher in the search engines since it’s a key element in search engine optimization.

*Blogging: Used to provide additional information as well as viral and website content on a particular brand or product. Blogs are helpful to build brand credibility and spread valuable information all the way across to the different social networks, thus generating more brand visibility. When a particular blog obtains a certain level of popularity, it is often used as a point of reference for followers and prospects to go back to for general industry information.

Traditionally, the main ways for brands to get found online are through SEO (search engine optimization) for corporate websites and  PPC (pay per click) by keyword bidding.

However, having good SEO will also depend on a series of fundamental aspects that will guarantee an increase in website traffic: good content, fresh content, good use of keywords and relevant phrases.

This means that if you want someone to find you easily and appear in the organic results, you must provide your website with a good selection of keyword phrases relevant to your business.

In result, you’re creating exposure for your brand and providing both searchers and search engines with what they’re looking for.

How do you fulfill this? Corporate blog. Blogs are rich in content, contain thousands of relevant keywords and get updated continuously with fresh, new content…exactly what search engines need in order to find you.

The more keywords the better the chance of appearing in the search results and the greater the chance you get spotted by a prospect.

Once you get found, your task is to develop a sincere and open dialogue with customers. Adopting a corporate blog could be one of the best ways to build a meaningful and ongoing customer relationship allowing for your readers to participate in conversation and interact freely with their favorite brand.

• Creating social media profiles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace
• Publishing new blogs, and writing guest posts on other blogs
• Creating user profiles in forums using a relevant keyword or brand name

This is typically the first step in façade online reputation management for brands or people worried about negative results about them in SERPs.

Facebook privacy settings and real time search dangers

Real time search on Twitter and Facebook is a practical way to see what people are saying about you and your brand right now.

Customers, friends, competitors, coworkers also can have access to what you are doing right now on social media, depending on how you decide to set privacy for your Facebook wall posts and updates: Facebook can compete with Twitter in terms of immediacy and visibility.

Choosing to make your Facebook posts visible to Everyone is the best way to make them searchable, but means you need to be extra careful with what you publish online.

A popular Facebook story about a girl who lost her job on facebook demonstrates what can happen if you write the wrong thing, and make it visible to the wrong audience. Moreover, the rise of social media as an information source for recruiting, and stories about employees damaging their brand, knowingly or not, show that expertise in social media is a vital skill.

Another recent example about mismanaged reputation on Twitter happened this morning, when UK musician Calvin Harris reacted very impulsively on his Twitter account to a negative review of his last album by a music critic. Even if you didn’t read the review, the way Calvin Harris handled himself in this situation, would put you on the side of the music critic.

Online reputation management on social media

Effective online reputation management is about contributing to the internet and building relationships. Online presence is getting more complex and more important as social media continues to grow in popularity.

Brands who embrace social media are gaining a clear advantage over those who don’t by showing that they care about their customers and are making an effort to communicate with them about what they both love: their products.

Genuine commitment is what make PR efforts positive for a brand’s reputation online. Blogs and forums need to be monitored, and competence in social media is crucial. Brands must understand when a negative comment is really important and then, given the situation, decide upon the most appropriate strategy to deal with it.

Establishing a strong presence in social media and managing it with the customer in mind, by engaging in genuine conversations, is not a paradox, but constitutes the key to online reputation management.

From my SEO standpoint, effective Information Architecture happens when web design grants usability and accessibility to well organized content.

Accessibility is also spiderability, and search engine optimization will make a website easy to crawl for bots, and pleasant to navigate for humans. Both kinds of visitors will come back to the website if relevant content is organized with usability and accessibility in mind.

Information Architecture is also about structuring information on a website. A thorough knowledge of the website’s content and an in-depth understanding of the target audience’s mind are required: How do users conceptualize the website’s topic, and what words do they use to talk about it?

Keyword research and classification for usability: Keyword Mapping

Hierarchical taxonomies, like nested category levels, from macro categories to the single specific item, can inspire intuitive navigation designs that allow easy access to information, if paired with a bottom up method like keyword research.

Don’t underestimate the value of offline keyword research, because it can give insights on what users would expect as a natural way of organizing information around a central topic. However, online keyword research is the pillar on which keyword mapping stands: broad and specific keywords show us what users want, and what kind of content a website page should provide.

Pages focused on unique keyword variations, will help avoiding keyword cannibalization, and point users and the search engine to the most relevant page for the query.

Information Architecture and web design challenges

An ideal Information Architecture will structure content in a natural, user friendly way that reflects target audience’s search queries, but what happens when users show multiple ways to search for the same information?

Some E-commerce websites use faceted classification to provide the best usability to users that look for products that can be classified on three or more dimensions. SEO efforts in this case need to focus on avoiding duplicate content, and designing keyword targeted pages with dedicated quality content and unique internal anchor text consistently used throughout the site.

Web evolution trends show the importance of providing individually relevant content to the user, starting from a correct assessment of user intent in search queries, and offering tools to parse and share information in a convenient way, like RSS feeds or social bookmarking websites.

The challenge of innovating without leaving the paved cowpath of traditional UI design will become less daunting day by day: widgeted dashboard pages can be an example, and in the future we can expect dynamic websites that will more and more recognize our personal web navigation patterns and adapt to them.

Another good reason: there are millions and millions of people surfing the Web (or Google for that matter),who are constantly in search of information, services, and products. And some of these people can represent potential clients who happen to be interested in what you’ve got to offer.

What are some ways in which you can stand out in order to get users to click on you? The two most common ways are paid advertising and natural or organic search. The latter is entirely dependent on what Google thinks about you and whether your content is in any way relevant and interesting.

How does Google calculate page rank? In very simple terms, without getting into the whole algorithmic aspect of it, it estimates a websites’ rank by the number of pages linking to it. So, this means that if a renowned website links to you, say Cnn.com, your page rank will quickly go up due to the fact that Cnn’s PageRank is 8 making a page with lots of credibility compared to one with a PageRank of 3.

Coincidentially, an article from Cnn.com which I was just reading defines PageRank as the currency of the Web. In short, it says that a link from a site with a high page rank counts for way more than a link from a site with low page rank.

Google’s official advice: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.”

On one hand, it is very important to do link building, however in must be done correctly. But before that happens, you need to make sure your website has the right, relevant content that helps you show up in the search results. As Cnn mentions, the Web is a vast territory and getting attention for a new site, even one with superb content, is a very difficult undertaking.

Once you get the relevant content, you work on your PageRank. How? You try to get as many inbound links as possible from those resources whose page rank is high. How? By spreading the word about your product or service and getting people to talk about you. The more people talk, the more those and others will come to you for information which will in turn make you a very credible and valuable company.

What do pages at the top of Google have in common? Good content.

Marketers are always looking for the best ways to optimize their websites. Before getting into the details of things we can already think of a list of activities to achieve this, for example: URL structure, meta tags, website architecture, keywords in the URL and web content, relevancy, etc.

But before we get into all that, we must turn our attention to content. Google loves content and good content is key to website optimization. It’s very important that you understand who your target audience is when building your website in order to cater your content based on that target market.

In most cases, you have the audience who is looking or needs something in particular, but is not sure what. Then there’s the audience who knows exactly what he/she wants who will go straight to the place where they can find it.

First thing they will do is run their keyword search on Google, land on a specific website, and boom! purchase is made. It is much easier to appeal to a person who already knows what he/she wants because all they do is execute their search using the exact keywords and land on the right website.

Those who are hesitant are harder to convince, therefore, good content is required. Having the right content, a good selection of keywords and clear website strategy will definitely get you a high position in Google.  Some main aspects to look at: keywords, keywords, keywords.

It is important you review your Pages or landing pages against the keywords from search. Study all the possible keyword options, from the most relevant to the least, including stem variations of keywords, and review those generating high bounces or more conversions and make your modifications accordingly.

Also, revise your content thoroughly together with your site navigation as to guarantee a better website experience for your users. This will lead your audience to your final objective. Offering useful information will lead to a call-to-action, this in turn will generate more leads and most importantly, increase sales.

As an attempt to satisfy all tastes Google has come up with a trio of services all targeted to help users ’slice and dice’ their Google search results.

Search Options is feature number one. Basically, it’s a tool that enables users to manipulate information and restrict search results by a certain criteria, ie: time, genre or reviews. One of the tools within the Search Options is the Wonder Wheel which provides users with related query suggestions and see result updates on real-time.

My search query was for ‘glasses’ and Google suggested I could also look into Dior glasses, bar glasses or RayBan glasses, which I clicked on for more refined results.

Google Squared is feature number two and one which is set to launch later this month under Labs. This tool organizes your results into a sort of spreadsheet that can be edited and saved as you would an Excel file.

The example as dicussed by Matt Cutts was for ’small dogs’. Google results displayed the types of breeds that corresponded to small dogs which stretched down the page as seen on image. Any missing data can be added into different rows as well as new columns  in order to retrieve corroborating facts on a given term.

Rich Media Snippets is the third feature presented by Google. Want to get some extra information on your search results? Rich Snippets are said to be a favorite for webmasters since it allows them to add a piece of code to their HTML, which will in theory program Google to reveal more information than the singular search result you’re used to.

These little pieces of text will extract more information and give you a richer view of the preview text. For instance, if you’re looking to try a new restaurant, the rich snippet will include a review of that restaurant or the restaurant’s price range which can both help you choose the right place. Same goes for people.  If you’re looking for someone but the results show more than one person with the same name, snippets will extract the location and profession of a particular person so you can tell if it’s the person you’re looking for.

Clearly, all three features give users a way to refine results at a much rapper pace and manipulate information to their needs. What has been your experience so far? Tell us your story!