The World Wide Web is absolutely starved for content. I mean, collectively we just can’t get enough of the stuff. Spiders devour it, webmasters have to keep feeding the spiders, bloggers have to manufacture content daily or risk losing their audience, press release sites have to keep populating their distribution networks - it’s a feeding frenzy akin to that scene at the end of Piranha 2. So from a marketing standpoint, it pays to know how to throw as many bikini-clad coeds into the surf as possible. One of the ways to ensure some successful visibility for your original content is to understand the difference between a press release and an article.

Online press releases are meant to relay newsworthy information about a company, product, service, event, etc. They are more often than not self-serving, strategic marketing tools. This doesn’t have to be a negative connotation, as many businesspeople want to stay current on happenings within their own company, industry or to keep an eye on competitors. If your press release is hot news, i.e. you work for Mozilla and your release is entitled “FireFox 2.0 Released Today”, in addition to PR networks you may also stand a change in SMO tagging sites like Digg, Reddit and del.icio.us. If you manufacture rollerskates in Toledo, and your release is entitled “ACME Rollerskates Hires New Product Manager”, then maybe don’t bother. Skip ahead to the articles section.

Popular press release sites and distribution networks include PR.com and PRWeb.com and both paid and free submission options exist. It’s worth it to pony (no pun intended) up the money for increased visibility within the networks and to get yourself a hyperlink (not part of the free option) in the process. Totally free PR services - which include hyperlinks - do exist including OpenPress and PRLeap.

Online articles can be about almost anything. If they are written well, and perceived by readers as an interesting and objective source of information, they can spread online like wildfire with a little help from our new friend social media. SMO success depends greatly on your subject’s position and article title. People love lists, and personally I have had great success positioning client-related articles with Top 10’s and the like. Don’t angle your article around the premise “Why You Should Buy Air Conditioners From Us”. Put one together called “How to Store Air Conditioners During Winter” - or better yet, “Top 10 Tips for Winter Air Conditioner Storage”. Do you see where I’m going with this?

Here is a great list of article release sites and distribution networks. Articles are great fodder for Digg and other social media sites due to their versatility and the potential for creative license above the boundaries of what has to constitute a press release. Before you submit an article to the various networks or a social voting site, post it on your own website via a news page or blog. If you’re taking the time to produce original content, repurpose it on your own domain. And again - don’t write an article that is blatantly marketing your company. Write an objective resource that relates to your product or services and then attach a subtle URL to your site near the bottom.

Just don’t ask me why I didn’t entitle this post “Top 5 ways to Write a Successful Article” or something. Obviously, I need to start taking my own advice. And to stop watching Piranha 2.

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Let’s face it - I’m a little long in the tooth to be using FaceBook. But, as they’re attempting to increase their value, FB has opened up the network to people without .edu email addresses. So here I am, an SEO/SEM enthusiast, getting to know all about ‘the Book’ and maybe feeling a little creepy about it in the process.

FaceBook is a social media network - a very functional and cool one, and Social Media Optimization has become an important facet of Search Engine Marketing. Social Media is hitting the online marketing space faster than a speeding RSS feed. The concept continues to evolve, and more and more internet marketers are looking for the next major way to fully leverage Social Media strategies for clients, products and services. Here is a site I made devoted to explaining SMO in greater detail.

SMO has the ability to attract and engage customers and web traffic in a way that organic search results and ‘Sponsored Listings’ on a search engine never will. The emerging field will grow with the same speed that social media itself has grown, as new tools and practices are shaped into coherent SMO tactics. If you use social media tools like a blog, Squidoo or HubPages for marketing purposes, then your focus should be on attracting potential customers or clients to visit your site in order to participate in relevant conversations about your products or services. SMO is about increasing the volume and richness of those interactions.

So, since we’re here, let’s talk about FaceBook. Aside from the obvious banner advertisements, how else do you see the network being used for marketing purposes - especially since it is now open to the public? And will the backlash from faithful members unappreciative of the new wave of intruders and marketers spell the end of the network’s credibility and popularity? I think it very well might.

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The SMO tag is so new, you can still see the mark where the delivery room doctor slapped it. The attending physician/blogger in this case was Rohit Bhargava who stated earlier this month: “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs“. So well done for coining a phrase - but I think most folks are still a bit foggy as to what SMO actually entails.

Social Media Optimization has been defined in similar ways by a variety of noteable bloggers - so today I’d like to look at some of these definitions and then try and boil SMO down into my own degree of rational original thought. Best of luck to me. So again - what is social media optimization? How does it differ from SEO and SEM? Let’s look at the early ways in which search engine marketing pundits have attempted to pigeonhole and explain the new phenomna.

Mark Nenadic writes: “When it comes to communicating online, there is a definite unique technique that surpasses them all, catering specifically to Internet Culture“. At the bottom of his recent article on WebProWorld, the author then does exactly that by providing readers the opportunity to add the article to social tagging and voting networks like Del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo & Furl with one simple click.

So the ‘catering’ aspect involves encouraging visitors to give you increased exposure through these social networks by making it as easy as possible. They’ll hang themselves if you give them enough rope, or something. Maybe I should have kept that analogy to myself. Regardless, Mark definitely practices what he preaches by including these quick links that make it easy to pump his content into news and link networks.

Lee Odden shares this opinion: Find ways to incorporate SMO tactics at the “template” level of document creation and as part of information distribution. Minor things like encouraging social bookmarks and rewarding incoming links as a standard practice across the organization can go a long way. I have already written an email to our development team here at SpiderSplat, asking them to include these sorts of shortcut links at the bottom of every post, and I suggest you do something along the same lines at your own company. Don’t cover your mouth when you cough. This can be considered the bare essence of SMO. Make it easy for the virus to spread, and do it by default everyday.

According to Hans Peter Brondmo: “1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it.” This is where the social element of SMO comes into focus, and contribution takes different forms. Squidoo and HubPages fall under social media because of the community and cross-pollination behind them - however lenses and hubs can only be edited by one ‘master’. WetPaint and Wikipedia, on the other hand, enable multiple authors to add to or enhance the same user-generated sections. Both models have their pros and cons, but both should technically be considered as new social media outlets due to their ability to get search engine and site-specific denizens buzzing about a subject almost instantaneously. Start a rumor, plant a seed and see what happens. You don’t have to do all the work anymore.

Whether you’re building a page with focused topic on BlueDot, submitting an older press release to Digg or finding a way to build a MySpace page for your company with a straight face - you’re participating in social media optimization. It’s a broad stroke and a very general term, however I do hope I’ve helped some people get their head around the newborn SMO acronym. Even though I’m not entirely sure if I have.

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Search Engine Marketing continues to become huge. No one is afraid to purchase goods or services online anymore, and credit cards around the globe are smoking due to overuse. Businesses are rushing to get their sites in front of target markets, and PPC and SEO efforts are becoming more common with each passing day. As searchers and advertisers have become more sophisticated, so has the specificity of utilized search terms - so much in fact, that a recent report by OneStat.com revealed that only 11% of search engine users enter only one keyword during searches.

“28.91 percent of the people use 2 word phrases, 27.85 percent use 3 word phrases and 17.11 percent use 4 word phrases. Less and less people use now 1 keyword since the last measurement in July 2005.“

Several assumptions can be made based on this percentage data. First of all, users are targeting their searches more than they have in the past. For example - “size 6 pink rollerskates” is far more likely to be used than simply “rollerskates“. People have been shopping on the internet for several years now, and their habits and comfort levels have changed as a result. To counter more specific searches, advertisers have increased their level of keyword research to cast a wider net. This has caused an increase in the bid price for words that formerly were only being bid on by a small amount of advertisers - or not at all. Less and less ’sweet spots’ exist these days, as PPC managers are compiling more comprehensive keyword inventories.

In short, keyword iterations have become more sophisticated. Different users will search for the same thing using a wide variety of terms. An individual looking for a hotel in New Hampshire, for example, may utilize all of the following:

• New Hampshire Hotel
• NH Hotel
• Nashua Hotel
• Nashua New Hampshire Hotel
• NH Red Roof Inn
• Red Roof Inn Nashua

To truly know their market and customers, PPC campaign managers have to be aware of and react to these changes in search habits. Targeted searches are more likely to convert to sales, but unfortunately for advertisers, high-converting, relevant and cheap keywords are steadily going the way of the dodo. It’s becoming more and more important to do your keyword homework to find the best ROI and value for your search marketing dollar.

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