I heard someone say that social media optimization is the new SEO. As outlined in a previous article, Social networking sites are generating a tremendous amount of qualified traffic and are exerting an influence on natural search results. This presents opportunities for webmasters to use search techniques to help better position their websites to attract more business. There are a few key areas that need attention, all of which will be covered in future articles. The most important factor is linking to other sites.
Links have always been important to search engines, but with social media they become paramount. You can take steps to make the content on your website more linkable. Press releases and white papers are useful, as are informational or resource pages, but they all present the same problem. Depending on your expertise, making changes to a website is generally a difficult and time consuming process. The quickest and most effective way of generating quality links is with a business blog. The quickest way to disseminate information is also through the publishing power of the blog.

According to a recent study from Hitwise, social networking sites are driving an increasing amount of traffic to shopping and classified sites. Google, in its association with MySpace is set to capitalize on this new trend. The search engine will no doubt be able to increase its lead over Yahoo and MSN and be able to increase its advertising prices accordingly.

But what about marketers who are trying to tap into this incredible increase in social media? How can they cost effectively use all of the new tools available, such as RSS, subscriptions and podcasting? With a blog, and an innovative blog marketing company.

The benefits of self publishing through a corporate blog are very clear. Progressive marketers are already using RSS, podcasting and social media to build their brands.  This gives them a powerful competitive advantage which will lead to increased market share. Soon a corporate blog will be as essential a business tool as a corporate website.

I recently had a conversation with two programmers from Microsoft. We began discussing their search division and how far behind they were to rivals Google and Yahoo. Instead of playing catch up to Google and Yahoo’s search they should be focusing their efforts and leading the way in Blog Search.

With traditional media missing consumers entirely, more and more advertisers look online to distribute their content. Unfortunately, a big percentage of company’s out there still have the CMO in charge who still believes that consumers are sitting by the TV, and or radio eagerly awaiting advertisements. You can place Google in with traditionally media here since many search results on Google return garbage.

Consumers are beginning to take control and the blogosphere is allowing them to do so.

Today, consumers have the control over what information they decide to put in front of them. Google and Yahoo’s organic search results are continuing to become less relevant to consumers searches. Most Retail Searches on Google will yield results for companies like Bizrate.com, shopping.Yahoo.com, nextag.com etc. in it’s organic results. If consumers want to shop at those websites there they will. They don’t choose Google to find retail aggregators. Consumers have already begun to turn their backs on traditional search engines due to their lack of relevant results. If Microsoft is smart, they will see this to their advantage and beef up their Blog Search division.
Consumers have created their own information-gated community called the blogosphere. At the present time, there is an open market for a really good Blog Search Engine. One that will enable advertisers and consumers to reach each other without so many middle men taking advantage of both sides.

U.S. Online Ad revenues for the first half of 2006 surpassed 7.9 billion dollars, 37% higher from the same period last year.  According to Pricewaterhousecoopers, Q2 revenues surpassed the 4 Billion Dollar mark a 36% increase from last year.  Video Ads will continue to emerge for advertising, “While search advertising remains the largest format in terms of revenues, we expect to see new formats like video ads to continue to emerge as advertisers seek to leverage the branding opportunities afforded by the growing installed base of broadband users,” David Silverman, Partner, Entertainment & Media Practice, PricewaterhouseCoopers. More….

I have been hearing a lot recently about the concept of social media optimization or SMO. With the advent of social search engines like Digg and Del.icio.us it is only natural that retailers are looking to add this relatively new phenomenon to their marketing mix. Wikipedia describes Social Media Optimization as follows…”a way to optimize websites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites. For example allowing RSS feeds, easier linking, incorporation of third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries or YouTube videos”.
Future articles will outline the ins and out of this new form of marketing, but one thing is very clear. Blogs, blog branding and blog marketing are a very large part of the picture.

I read an interesting article on Site Pro News which debated the relative merits of paid search advertising in contrast with SEO. To paraphrase the article, SEO was desirable for some of the following reasons:

*People click on natural search results at a higher rate than paid advertisements. The percentages vary tremendously depending on the search engine and the industry, but most marketers will agree that natural search results get two to three times more clicks than paid listings.

*People trust information found in natural search results more than paid listings, and will convert into buying customers at a higher rate.

*Paid search costs continue to rise.

*Paid search is not a long term marketing solution. As soon as you stop paying Yahoo or Google, your traffic goes away.

Paid Search was desirable for some of the following reasons:

*You can control your campaign a lot easier. If you need additional business, you bid higher. If not, you turn the bids down.
*Yahoo and Google don’t ask for annual contracts.

The pay per click model did present a few advantages, but the winner in this particular debate was natural search.  The question is, how do you get there? How do you impress search engines to the point that they will list your web site on that all important first page? And more importantly, how do you fit natural search optimization into your budget? Most SEO firms are prohibitively expensive, and a pretty high percentage of them do not deliver.
The solution is to run a blog marketing campaign. Having an effectively optimized blog and writing articles will get better results quicker and for less cost than hiring an SEO company. It will also bring in better quality traffic and be a better long term solution than paid search.

I came across an interesting tool offered by the company Crazy Egg, which maps out where visitors are going when they visit your website. The tool does not solve the problem of getting traffic to your site, but it does give very useful information on how to convert those visitors into revenue. This information is invaluable to etailers who want to ensure their sites are converting at the highest possible rate into sales.

The features offered are an overlay of where your clicks are coming from on a particular page, a list of traffic behavior and statistics, and most interestingly a heat map showing traffic patterns.

It looks like MSN is experimenting with a new search platform. Many of the Live Search  features, found after you hit the search button and when you hit the more button, include the integration of blogs into search and a cool feature that is still in beta called Q&A. This gives you the ability to ask and answer questions as part of an online community, similar in style to Yahoo Answers.

The most interesting thing to me though, is that when you hit the more button you have the option to look at “feeds”. This gives you all of the RSS feeds that relate to your search. This is useful if you want to get the most relevant feeds for a particular topic delivered to you in a timely manner. If I had a great interest in receiving information about retail blog marketing or other related topics, I would simply conduct the search on MSN, hit the feeds button and add the most relevant feed to my blog reader. In the case of this particular search, the most relevant feed is from our own retail related blog.

Miva has added in line advertising to their platform and are including dymamic links within the body or text of articles, including blog articles. The advantages to pay per performance companies are obvious. This kind of advertising adds another revenue stream and uses up less space on the page, however it can be a little distracting to readers to have multiple links within an article.

This makes blog marketing even more attractive to writers as it presents yet another way for bloggers to generate revenue. Adsense, text links and now in line advertising all make it easy to not only make the blog work for your website, but also work as an additional reveneue stream.