In a word, yes. Optimizing for a semantic search - Yahoo! will be using semantic search algorithms, too – is not only possible, it’s recommended. You’ll want to be certain that you tag your content properly – whether it’s Web pages, videos, photos, audio clips, blogs or anything else – to help the search engines determine the relevance of your content.

That’s something you should be doing anyway – semantics or no semantics. If you could only do one thing to help a search engine find and rate your content, tagging just might be it. Just be certain that your tags are relevant to the content. If you mistag your content, or provide such general tagging that your content gets lost, you’ll be penalized by the search engine. Deliberately misidentifying your content is a good way to get your listing deprecated or removed. Failing to provide specific tags will relegate your content to a no-man’s land where your target audience rarely, if ever, goes.

If you don’t tag your content now, get in the habit of doing it. Think about the tags you’re applying and how they relate to your content. Be specific and accurate when you tag your content and stick to your optimization plan.

Universal search can be a good thing. Will you always hit in all areas? Probably not, but it will help your audience find the content it is looking for quickly and accurately, as long as you do your part!

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Corporate blogging is just one part of a broader strategy to find, understand and serve consumers who visit the corporate Web site, or use the corporation’s products. It’s value in soliciting and collecting feedback is inestimable. If used correctly, corporate blogging can propel a company to the forefront, and position it well ahead of the competition, simply by delivering the content and the connection that consumers want.

Some corporate blogs are written by a single person, or are put together by the corporate media group. Other companies put their executives out on the front line to connect with and field feedback from the consumer public. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but consistency in terms of message, value in terms of content, and the ability to include your consumers in the conversation will enable your corporate blogging strategy to deliver its highest potential.

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Spam, whether it’s in your inbox, your blog comments or the keywords on your site, is a friend to no one. It creates “noise” where “signal” ought to be, and makes it harder for visitors to find your site.

Spammers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to deceive the search engine spiders, and programmers spend an inordinate amount of time trying to frustrate rogue blog comments. However, developing an algorithm that can reliably detect a rogue blog comment is much easier said than done.

So as a blogger, how can you reduce the number of rogue blog comments you receive? Matt Cutts, from Google addressed the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference last week and suggested that bloggers should build trust mechanisms into their blogs, and blog programmers should incorporate methods whereby legitimate comments can be distinguished quickly from spam.

One suggestion was to require commenters to provide a valid email address, essentially establishing an account on the blog. Some type of authentication, to verify that the poster is actually human is another way. You may have seen Captcha on a blog or e-commerce site. It delivers a difficult-to-read string of numbers and/or letters that the user has to type in and submit before being allowed to comment or continue with a submission. Other similar technologies require the user to pick out certain photographs or answer a simple question. These activities are remarkably simple for a human to perform but boggle the spambots.

Cutts suggested that hosted blogging solutions are also a good way to reduce your status as a target. A hosted solution is monitored and updated with the latest patches and software versions (you hope!) and tends to be less vulnerable to known attacks.

He also pointed out that Google has developed a Webmaster resource that can help tired, overwhelmed or inexperienced Webmasters with tools like an auto-notification that alerts you if your site is being spammed by rogue blog comments, and stats to help you understand where your traffic is coming from.

In any event, it’s good to keep an eye on your comments (or moderate them) and delete irrelevant ones when they show up. Relevance is big with Google, and it’s a good bet that a blog that’s loaded up with rogue blog comments will get deprecated in the SERPs pretty quickly.

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If you the term is unfamiliar to you, microblogging consists of very short posts – some as small as 150 characters or less. The posts are published usually via a mobile phone and can include video and photos in addition to text.

For some organizations, microblogging won’t be of much use, but if your blog offers time-sensitive information, or you want to send near real-time reports to your audience, microblogging may offer just the platform. For example, if you attend a trade show, you can post images and video from the show floor with information about new products and services related to your industry.

Twitter, Tumblr and Pownce are the most popular microblogging platforms today, and are demonstrating the value of microblogging. Many people use microblogging as a way to catalog their day, but you can also find ways to deliver important, relevant business information using one of these platforms. And as with microblogging’s big brother, you get the same RSS feed advantage. Your readership will be alerted when you post new information.

Again, microblogging isn’t for everyone, and you’ll need to contend with the small message size, but it’s a great way to post video and photo files quickly. If it complements your niche, microblogging may be worth a closer look.

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The site is really nothing more than a Web 2.0 suggestion box, but at the same time, Starbucks most valuable consumers have taken to it because it’s an easy, convenient way for them to access the Starbucks corporate administration. The site accepts consumer feedback, and comments, much like what you would find on a blog or social networking site. Visitors can also vote on ideas. The site is succeeding, despite critics’ predictions to the contrary, because clearly consumers feel like they’re being heard, and they like that!

If you visit the site, you’ll see that voting is an integral part of the brainstorming process. Popular ideas get pushed to the top of the list. The volume of comments on an idea can also affect its placement, as can the timeliness of the voting. The company also offers its own feedback, in the form of reports about ideas and what will happen with them.

Starbucks has established a marketplace of ideas, and for whatever it cost, they’ll get more ideas than they can handle in a short period of time from those people who matter most to the company: the consumers. Starbucks is working with Salesforce.com to manage this site. You may recognize Salesforce.com as being the principal behind Dell’s IdeaStorm.com Web site.

This site is a perfect illustration of how a Web site can be used to establish and promote a good relationship between a business and its consumers. By broadening the process of product development and product improvement, and by collecting consumer feedback via public forum, companies like Starbucks and Dell are breathing new life into the old suggestion box.

You don’t need to set up a separate site to get consumer feedback for your company; your blog will do just fine. If you don’t yet have a corporate blog, set one up and start building your consumer relationships today.

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Another finding showed that the number of respondents who watched video online grew from 30 percent in 2006 to 80 percent in 2007. The survey also showed major increases in other online content activities, like listening to podcasts, subscribing to RSS feeds and commenting on news items.

Again, this should be telling you something about social media: the number of consumers who use it is growing, and users are subscribing to a variety of different content delivery vehicles. You can reach your target audience in a number of “creative” and “ordinary” ways. The key is to reach out to your audience. They’re waiting to hear from you!

In a survey of Internet users worldwide, Universal McCann found that MySpace and Facebook also have significant contact with networked users. The audience for these vehicles is between one-quarter and one-third, but these social media networks represent yet another opportunity to reach out to your potential audience.

Beyond blogging, social media opens up a number of opportunities to interact with people who are interested in your niche. If you haven’t made plans to do so already, these numbers may justify a review of your current online marketing strategy.

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Search engine spiders “crawl” your pages to find out what’s on your site and to categorize it for placement in search engine results. Creating a site map is one very easy way to make sure that the search engine spiders can reach each page in your site. Site maps are most often created for the benefit of a search engine, but visitors find them useful, too. Well-constructed, spider-friendly site maps help the search engine find all of the interior pages of your site and index them for later retrieval.

A complete site map is a single page that contains an HTML link to every other page on your site. Site maps are rarely beautiful. Instead, they’re simple pages that lay out a logical connection to each interior page. Organization and HTML links are the most significant requirements for a simple site map. If your site map contains these, you’re in good shape.

Providing a site map benefits your human visitors because they can quickly find the information or interior pages they’re looking for. Most visitors won’t look at your site map. Instead, they’ll prefer to navigate your site using the navigational aids you’ve built into your site. For some visitors, however, a site map provides a clear option to locate and access a particular page on your site.

The site map will be examined in great detail by a search engine spider, so making the page as spider-friendly as possible is important. You can tailor your keyword optimization strategies carefully and get those optimized pages into the search engine fast.

Site maps can also extend the page rank your home page enjoys to the rest of your site, provided that your site map is linked off of your top-level page. Spider behavior also provides a good reason to integrate your blog into your own Web site instead of having it hosted elsewhere. An integrated blog can take better advantage of site rankings.

The takeaway here is that a site map, while not much to look at for your human visitors, is an essential component of your Web site and can help get your entire site indexed quickly and regularly!

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In a 2007 Manning Selvage and Lee survey, seven of ten marketing professionals said that they already targeted bloggers or were planning to in an effort to better deliver their messages. Nearly half said that they were watching consumer-generated content carefully.

Perhaps the most revealing information about blogging as a marketing technique comes from a 2007 study that showed that marketing leaders used blogs twice as much as non-leaders did. Blogging has a big impact on the current generation of consumers and businesses who use blogging as a marketing technique clearly benefit.

You’ll get the biggest bang from blogging when you establish a direct relationship between your products or services and the blog. Provide well-thought out information, reviews and commentary to add value to your blog and you’ll establish yourself as a leader in the field.

Blogging is too big a factor in consumer research and purchasing decisions to ignore. As a marketing technique, blogging is a great way to establish a competitive advantage over other businesses in your niche. It also helps to establish you as a readily available authority that people turn to and trust when they want information, opinions and expertise.

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For the new blogger, the simple answer is yes and no. Initially, trackbacks were calculated into ranking algorithms, but trackbacks can be (and are) abused, most frequently by spammers. Most search engine algorithms don’t count trackbacks the way they did in the past.

Are trackbacks still a good thing? You bet! Links from other blogs are always good, even if they don’t produce a measurable change in the search engine results. Remember, the goal for a new blogger is to build the audience. If another blogger is talking about you or your blog, he or she is drawing attention to you. That’s what you want. Yes, search engine placement is good, but there are more effective search engine placement techniques.

If a blogger is talking about you regularly, or vice versa, consider exchanging blogroll listings. Thatwill help, provided that your blogs are on related subject matter.

A blogroll listing from a related blog is worth a lot. If trackbacks produce that relationship, or deliver potential new audience members to your blog, they’re doing their job. They can also help you monitor the traffic to your blog and find out where your readers come from.

As a new blogger, if you don’t have trackbacks turned on and you want to experiment with them for awhile, you can enable them, usually in the configuration options for your blog. These auto-notifications are uniformly referred to as TrackBacks on the most popular Web platforms. You’ll want to set your blog to allow TrackBacks or notifications from other Weblogs.

Once TrackBacks are turned on, your blog will notify you when it receives a TrackBack from another blog. TrackBacks provide a simple way to find out who’s reading your blog, and can give you an introduction to other bloggers in your field. You can also find additional training and tips on changes to your blog configuration that can help you grow your blogging audience.

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When you activate RSS feeds for your web content, you provide an easy way for visitors to determine when your content has changed. It’s an active invitation to revisit a Web site. Each time you publish new content, the RSS feed automatically updates visitors who subscribe to your feed. They will know instantly that you’ve put new material on your site.

One of the prime benefits of RSS for the reader is that they can organize the blogs they want to read inside a browser or news reader. Each time the blog content is updated, the reader is notified. He or she doesn’t have to remember to visit the blog, because the blog automatically issues an invitation to come back.

One of the prime benefits for the blogger is that once someone subscribes to your blog, they will return again and again. It provides you with ample opportunity to develop a relationship with that reader. You’ve got his or her attention. As long as you generate quality material, your reader will return. Regular readers are also more likely to recommend your blog to other readers, based on your content.

RSS can also automate email and IM contact with your readers. Your RSS feed can let them know instantly that new content is waiting for them using the tools they most prefer to use.

RSS marketing can really invigorate your Web marketing strategy and cement your relationships with your visitors. If you’re not using RSS marketing in conjunction with your blog and Web site, you’re missing out on some excellent relationship opportunities.

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