I am still shocked about how few of my FB friends have added the new timeline profile to their page. So here is a link to the app so that you can add it if you haven't already. TIMELINE is now available to everyone! If you want to get it, Go to https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline & click the "Get Timeline" button.

Introducing Timeline
www.facebook.com
Timeline is the new Facebook profile. Tell your life story through photos, friendships and personal milestones like graduating or traveling to new places.

Redberry Website Designs releases a new promotional video for our client Gary W. Chessman DPM, FACFAS, Orlando Podiatric Surgeon.

With a video ad you can provide a testimonial and demonstrate your product or service in a compelling, easy to understand way. You can show, not just tell, your prospects exactly what makes your company, brand, product or service the better choice. Video marketing really brings your site up to date.

Adding a video promo to a web site has consistently shown to improve conversions. In fact, 80% of visitors will watch the ad and 52% of visitors take action, according to the Online Publishers Association. The reason why is clear… people learn more and retain more with multimedia.

Contact Redberry Website Designs to get your project stated today!

 

I had a chance to preview the coming Facebook Timeline feature last night and I am really excited about this! Very soon, users' profile pages will be presented differently. Instead of a list of recent activity with links to earlier posts, Timeline will condense users' recent and past posts, pictures and activities so that their entire history appears on one page. The format looks something like a scrapbook, with pictures and video displayed much larger than they are now. Users can see full galleries or hidden posts by simply hovering over points on a literal line. As a FB app deveIoper, I installed the preview app and this is what I am seeing.

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Redberry Designs partners with you to make sure that the findability of your online business is pushed up to the top search engine ranking position.  Contact our team to get your project started today!  Click Here to Get a Quote Now!

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About the Author: Jannice Boyd Almansur (http://www.jannice.info/) is Managing Director of  Redberry Atlanta Website Designs. Redberry is an Agency that offers Branding, Website Development and Hosting Solutions and a full portfolio of business content marketing and brand identity solutions for small businesses. To learn more and to download FREE business tools and articles, as well as join their mailing list, visit the our BerryPatch Blog at http://www.redberrydesigns.com/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=419 and Redberry Atlanta Website Design website at http://www.redberryatlantawebsitedesign.com. You may print this article for personal use or republish it online only if it is left unaltered and in its entirety, including bylines, links and author information. Contact the author for all other permissions.

It is always surprising to me how many smaller brands and individuals using Facebook, still do not really get the point or perhaps just flat out miss some of the more nuanced impacts of this terrific tool. In the past few weeks alone, I have read posts from several of my Facebook friends stating that they were limiting their networks on Facebook. This struck me as ironic, because recently I have been working diligently to do just the opposite; broadening my network and moving from multiple "Sybil like" personalities by blending my various personalities on Facebook into just me . So here are my lessons learned from a failed approach.

Now for those of you who don't get the "Sybil" reference... Sybil is a 1976 drama film that originally aired as a made-for-television miniseries. It was based on the book of the same name. (just Google it) If you have not seen it, I highly suggest you rent this title for your next movie night. It is old but really well acted, or you may consider reading the book.

In the movie, the main character, Sybil Dorsett was suffering from dissociative identity disorder as a result of the psychological trauma she suffered as a child. In my case, it was just what seemed to be a reasonable assumption and tactic based on my professional corporate background and upbringing from parents who were small business owners in a small close-knit community. Sybil, with the help of her psychiatrist, gradually recalls the severe child abuse that led to the development of 16 different personalities. While I only segmented my Facebook personalities into three pages; equally as non-dramatic, my realization came the old fashioned way... Here is to trial and error...when you find something does not work, don't be afraid to try something else.

My Facebook Personalities:

1. Professional Jannice: Holds my corporate identity. This page showcases my past professional roles, current technical abilities, plays the intellectual and helps me pursue a corporate professional relationship with current clients, prospective clients, and past co-workers. Professional Jannice has a set avatar, and plays a part in branding my marketing company, it entertains with a whole host of other strangers that look good in cyberspace, but lack substance, they as well are basically using the same technique. Over time I discovered that they are all about what I call "me, me, me, marketing" because they have no real connection and only need each other to make an impression. They are lost in a sea of "it is all about me" messages.




2. Friends and Family Jannice: Casual, filled with the most real interactions, a place to really connect with family members many of whom I have not seen in years. Speaks in friendly voice, a very strong, sophisticated and mature personality who knows the people connected on the page, but is not interacting regularly because of having to spend so much time posting on the professional page to build up my start-up company. The real irony here is that this where the potential for the most support for both emotional and professional goals will come from.




3. Neighborhood Jannice: Connected to all of her neighbors and some folks that she has met at neighborhood parties. But like the friends and family page they are being neglected for the corporate page. Which is really too sad.

While I finally see that the benefits of having a single persona on Facebook truly out weigh the con's, it still does not negate all my original reasons for the segmenting in the first place. So I have decided that the superior approach is educating myself as well as those around me. Here is my attempt at just that. “What are the three biggest mistakes that I made in relation to my Facebook strategy? I am in the process of correcting mine... Are you willing to learn from my mistakes and re-think yours?”

Big misconception #1: Believing that your online conversational "posts" can be as candid as those in face to face one-on-one interactions.

Ok, so I admit that I did not actually make this mistake. In fact, I may have been on the other extreme of not sharing enough however part of my reasoning for my initial "Sybil Strategy", was that many of my family, friends and even some of my neighbors make this mistake often in their posts on Facebook. Let's face it, five years ago many of you had never even heard of Facebook as it was only launched in 2004. I would suggest that those who make this mistake are missing the point and more importantly the power of Facebook. It is not the equivalent of your personal inner circle, quite the opposite it is the one place where you can engage with all of your connections from your many different social communities. Everyone from your local minister, your child's school teacher, old classmates, new friends and even business prospects and clients.

It should be no secret that the majority of deep meaningful conversations still happen offline. I can't think of even one person that I have ever met that would get the family dressed and go to church on Sunday morning. Then shortly after the sermon starts or the choir starts singing would scream across the church horrible obscenities and accusations to their deadbeat ex. Or who would commence to berating their teenage child in the middle of the church. I can't even imagine a teenager that would have an open fight with their boyfriend or girlfriend in the middle of church. Not even one man or woman married or single that would pull out their wallets and begin sharing pictures of barely clothed women or men to everyone in the congregation. Well, wake up people! if you would not do in in front of your minister, mother, grandparents, children, boss, or anyone else, then don't do it on Facebook. After all it is just a giant interconnected database that stores your posts and updates forever and that if your privacy settings are not high enough, shares instantly every, word, picture, comment, like, connection or post that you make with everyone that knows you as well as everyone that is connected to your friends friends...Get it?

So, this is not intended to scare you away from Facebook, but to remind you that just like any powerful technology or tool we must learn to use it effectively for what it was intended to be used for.

Keep in mind that true personal and professional benefits can be achieved through the positive interactions that we make with our online connections on Facebook. Here are a few "must dos" when using Facebook to connect with your social communities:

• Use the Facebook chat, messages and private video chats if you have to have a complex communication with someone. Remember that if the conversation is not appropriate for all audiences try to wait until you can meet the target face to face.
• For those of you using your Facebook page for both personal and professional purposes, create a business page for your business and invite your friends to "like" your business page. On your personal Facebook page be considerate when posting topics that are promotional in nature, to make sure that the content can be enjoyed by all. One way to achieve this is to ask for input through polls or questions that allow everyone to share their opinion on the topic. On your business page consider using social media campaigns that interact directly with your friends to humanize your brand in ways that were never possible before.
• When you invite new people to your page, try to stop by and make a personal post or message with them right away. Keep in mind that if you want people to interact with you, you must also interact with them.
• Release post on a regular basis to develop a cohesive personality, and try to keep it positive or allow for and encourage conflicting view points.
• If you must segment your friends on your page into categories, use the great tools available on the platform. Like "Lists", which allows you to create list such as co-workers, neighbors, clients, family etc. Once you create a list you have the power to choose who will see certain post on your wall. But I still advocate for an open policy of self moderation. In my opinion the best policy is that if you can't say it to everyone then you should not be saying in on Facebook.

Relationships online...image by Bryan Person

Some rights reserved by Image BryanPerson

Big misconception #2: Failing to think about what not to post on your Facebook page holistically

Another mistake many of us make is to view our content and posts through blinders (you know, those black things put on the sides of a horse’s eyes so they only look straight ahead). You need to think about your posts in terms of how it relates to and impacts all other aspects of your relationships, as well as your safety and that of your family.

According to Facebook, the company's unofficial mission is to make "the world more open and connected." But there are limits to how open you should be on Facebook and while you might enjoy sharing photos and status updates, there are some pieces of information you would do well never to share.

What NOT To Post On Facebook: 13 Things You Shouldn't Tell Your Facebook Friends

SOURCE: The Huffington Post Catharine Smith and Bianca Bosker First Posted: 11/1/10 10:14 AM ET Updated: 5/25/11 06:05 PM ET

• Your Birth Date And Place: We all want to hear the many kind comments from Facebook well-wishers on your birthday, you should think twice before posting your full birthday. In revealing your exact birthday and your place of birth it is like handing over your financial security to thieves. as well researchers recently discovered that someone that is resourceful enough could reconstruct social security numbers using an individual's birthday and place of birth.
  
  Suggestion: Rather than remove your birthday entirely, you could enter a date that's just a few days off from your real birthday.

• Your Mother's Maiden Name: "Your mother’s maiden name is an especially valuable bit of information, not least since it’s often the answer to security questions on many sites," writes the New York Times. Credit card companies, your wireless service provider, and numerous other firms frequently rely on this tidbit to protect your personal information.

• The Layout Of Your Home: Facebook users should never to post photos that reveal the layout of an apartment or home and the valuables therein.

• Your Long Trips Away From Home: Don't post status updates that mention when you will be on extended periods away from home. When you broadcast your vacation dates, you might be telling untrustworthy Facebook "friends" that your house is empty and unwatched for long periods of time. " You may want to be more vague about actual dates and avoid specific times.

• Your Short Trips Away From Home: Although new features like Facebook Places encourage you to check in during outings and broadcast your location (be it at a restaurant, park, or store), you might think twice even before sharing information about shorter departures from your home. "Don’t post messages such as 'out for a run' or 'at the mall shopping for my sweetie,'" Just keep in mind that many more eyes are on your post than you many think...

• Your Inappropriate Photos: By now, nearly everyone knows that racy, illicit, or otherwise incriminating photos posted on Facebook can cost you a job (or worse). But even deleted photos could come back to haunt you. Experts have recently discovered that Facebook's servers can store deleted photos for an unspecified amount of time. "It's possible," according to Facebook, "that someone who previously had access to a photo and saved the direct URL from our content delivery network partner could still access the photo."

• Confessionals: Flubbing on your tax returns? Can't stand your boss? Pulled a 'dine and dash?' Don't tell Facebook. The site's privacy settings allow you to control with whom you share certain information--for example, you can create a group that consists only of your closest friends--but, once posted, it can be hard to erase proof of your illicit or illegal activities, and difficult to keep it from spreading.
  
  There are countless examples of workers getting fired for oversharing on Facebook, as well as many instances in which people have been arrested for information they shared on the social networking site.

• Your Phone Number: Watch where you post your phone number. Include it in your profile and, depending on your privacy settings, even your most distant Facebook "friends" (think exes, elementary school contacts, friends-of-friends) might be able to access it and give you a ring. Sharing it with Facebook Pages can also get you in trouble. Developer Tom Scott created an app called Evil that displays phone numbers published anywhere on Facebook. According to Scott, "There are uncountable numbers of groups on Facebook called 'lost my phone!!!!! need ur numbers!!!!!' Most of them are marked as 'public', and a lot of folks don't understand what that means in Facebook's context -- to Facebook, 'public' means everyone in the world, whether they're a Facebook member or not."
  
  Recently Facebook made all phone number listed on profiles visible in a contact/address book for each users profile. Here are the steps to remove your number so it will not be displayed. http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-20090906-285/how-to-remove-your-phone-number-from-facebook/

• Your 'Risky' Behavior: You take your classic Camaro out for street racing, soar above the hills in a hang glider, or smoke like a chimney? Insurers are increasingly turning to the web to figure out whether their applicants and customers are putting their lives or property at risk, according to Insure.com.
  
  There have been additional reports that insurance companies may adjust users' premiums based what they post to Facebook. Given that criminals are turning to high-tech tools like Google Street View and Facebook to target victims, some say that they wouldn't be surprised if, as social media grow in popularity and more location-based applications come to fore, insurance providers consider these in their pricing of an individual's risk.

• Your Profile On Public Search: Do you want your Facebook profile--even bare-bones information like your gender, name, and profile picture--appearing in a Google search? If not, you should should block your profile from appearing in search engine results. Consumer Reports advises that doing so will "help prevent strangers from accessing your page." To change this privacy setting, go to Privacy Settings under Account, then Sharing on Facebook.

Earlier last year my business partner published a really great article on how to manage your personal online image. In the industry we call it identity management. Read More >>Do You Need To Clean Up Your Act?

Bottom line: I want to think about safety on Facebook.

The Bad Communication Monster...by Doug Haslam

Big misconception #3: Trying to be a business brand before you can be a friend on Facebook.

This is a big one. It is the most significant lesson that I learned from trying to manage the many personalities of Jannice. By separating the many aspects of me, I could not truly be me, and because of that no one could truly get the opportunity to know me. Therefore, the only real way to connect on Facebook is to connect as you.

But what that does not mean is that you should loose any thread of privacy, tact, or modesty. From the "Sybil Strategy" the great take-away is to combine the very best parts of yourself all into one page and do not be afraid to share, reach out, comment, join in and connect often with the folks that are friends on your page.

When you’re just using Facebook for fun it seems like there's no harm in letting your hair down and diving in with all guards down, but keep in mind the church scenario that I described at the beginning of this article.

Always make sure that you take your personal and family's safety and security into consideration by getting the facts before you start inviting and sharing. I suggest that you develop a strategy. Yes, a deliberate strategy. Regardless of what that strategy is you need to make sure that you know exactly why you are on Facebook and what are your expectations.

Talking about strategy, always keep in mind that we are not a homogeneous society, this is especially true on Facebook. As you increase your friends from your original circle of friends and family, you will start to get the true benefit of Facebook. You will have the opportunity to connect with people from many different walks of life, and from all over the world with many different cultures. So just like you, they many have a strategy in being on Facebook, of which you will never know the true details. I say this to remind us that keeping your post from diving off into overly extreme topics or views. Trust me we all have them, but we don't all necessarily need to have them in writing for the world to see. Don't bland down your conversations so much that you become boring. Instead try posing more narrow topics as a question, invite people to join in and share their views. You never know you might learn something or become the teacher yourself.

If you are a business, or have like me decided to open your page up to both close friends, clients, family and really everyone, understand that social media content engagement doesn’t necessarily translate directly to sales conversions online or offline. The ROI or sales will likely not be immediate. If the audience consuming content is further up the purchase funnel, the goal of your social media engagement should be to make everyone aware of your existence. You need to be patient before they’ll be ready to move to consideration or business focused purchasing conversations. Content marketing and social media engagement strategy is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. The benefits of high quality content marketing through social media engagement are great but come over time and therefore should be evaluated over time. Please don't turn off your family, friends and true lifetime supporters, by being one tracked. This one has been a hard one for me, because it is so easy once you put on your business hat to be laser focused, but what I have come to understand is that your strategy on Facebook using an integrated personalities approach needs to be considerate of your social community as a whole. I now have responsibility to be a friend before I am a business person.

Conclusion

The world of social media engagement is always evolving. Regardless of you being or representing a brand yourself or just an individual trying to reach out to your social community; there’s a right way to do both branding online and socializing, and it’s all about the content. Provide people with smart, thoughtful, high quality content, embrace recommendations and favorable content created by third parties, make your communication two way by stopping by other's pages to say hi and visit, and above all be patient and you shall win the marathon with long-term advocates.

We would love to hear your comments, thoughts and answers to this post.  Also if anyone has any additional questions or differing strategies that we have not thought of here please feel free to pose them here.

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Redberry Designs partners with you to make sure that the findability of your online business is pushed up to the top search engine ranking position.  Contact our team to get your project started today!  Click Here to Get a Quote Now!

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About the Author: Jannice Boyd Almansur (http://www.jannice.info/) is Managing Director of  Redberry Atlanta Website Designs. Redberry is an Agency that offers Branding, Website Development and Hosting Solutions and a full portfolio of business content marketing and brand identity solutions for small businesses. To learn more and to download FREE business tools and articles, as well as join their mailing list, visit the our BerryPatch Blog at http://www.redberrydesigns.com/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=419 and Redberry Atlanta Website Design website at http://www.redberryatlantawebsitedesign.com. You may print this article for personal use or republish it online only if it is left unaltered and in its entirety, including bylines, links and author information. Contact the author for all other permissions.

 We have clients that have experienced anywhere from a 20% upwards to a 60% increase  in sales based on the strategies we have implemented for them.  If we had to point to the one factor that was consistent among the most successful of them, it would be the fact that they all have real tangible proven business plans. Redberry Website Design partners with small businesses to help them develop and  execute their growth strategies.  It has been our experience that our clients experience exceptional ROI relative to the investment required to retain our services.  One of the biggest challenges that we face when developing a marketing, branding, and  website development strategy for prospective clients, is their lack of business plans and concrete financial planning.    So I pose this question to you... Are you managing your business for success? ...or is it a series of nebulous conversations, strategies and tactics.  Here are some questions that you need to answer before attempting to either acquire outside investors or even before making your own capital investments in resource, services and capital.   

Does your small business, organization or non-profit?

1. Prepare an annual budget?          
2. Have financial statements audited or reviewed (not just compiled) by a CPA annually?         
3. Have a mission and vision statement made known to your employees and customers?         
4. Engage in planning beyond the current year?        
5. Have an outside board of directors to help guide your company?  
6. Have key performance indicators that are reviewed regularly?       
7. Have a solid growth strategy?     
8. Have necessary resources (people, money, etc.) to grow?
9. Have the desire, drive, and enthusiasm to grow and execute growth strategies?     

We would love to hear your comments, thoughts and answers to these questions.  Also if anyone has any additional questions that we have not thought of here please feel free to pose them here.

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Redberry Designs partners with you to make sure that the findability of your online business is pushed up to the top search engine ranking position.  Contact our team to get your project started today!  Click Here to Get a Quote Now!

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About the Author: Jannice Boyd Almansur (http://www.jannice.info/) is Managing Director of  Redberry Atlanta Website Designs. Redberry is an Agency that offers Branding, Website Development and Hosting Solutions and a full portfolio of business content marketing and brand identity solutions for small businesses. To learn more and to download FREE business tools and articles, as well as join their mailing list, visit the our BerryPatch Blog at http://www.redberrydesigns.com/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=419 and Redberry Atlanta Website Design website at http://www.redberryatlantawebsitedesign.com. You may print this article for personal use or republish it online only if it is left unaltered and in its entirety, including bylines, links and author information. Contact the author for all other permissions.

Please click on the image to the left to get a downloadable PDF list of the top 10 places to post and host your videos and this poster.

Video is an excellent way to communicate your message in a dynamic interactive way.

Web Video is an excellent way to deliver your message and make a great impression and is one of the most effective methods of communicating your business essentials. Tell your story quickly, compellingly and relevantly! Online video adds a new dimension to content marketing enhancing your website and should be considered by any website owner who is serious about making their website effective and competitive.

Now that you have made the decision to post your video online. Here are our best strategies and tips designed to help you to be found online, presented in these three videos produced by the team here at Redberry Atlanta Website Design.

Get ready to discover how to take clear steps to boost your visibility online using video. Playlist: Segment 1, 2 and 3: 



Summary of Segments:

Building Context




Summary of Building Context 
Start with creating context for your post by giving the search engines what they need to understand your video content.  And that is text that was written with these three keys in mind as they relate to the title, tags and description.  

You will want to take some extra care to as you craft the title, tags and description. 

1. Be very descriptive 
2. Make them keyword rich 
3. And keyword strategic 

Apply these three keys to any content that you post online and you will be well on your way to creating the context and relevance that both your search engines and prospects require to find your videos online.   

Make sure that you create the title and tags that give the most detail so that your topic is clear.  Try researching your keywords before including them in your title and tags.        

Distribution

In segment two, I cover distribution, which is very important.  You can either do this yourself or if you have a large project to get out, Redberry Website Design can do this for you. Whether you do it yourself or have us do it for you, the principle is the same, you take your video and publish it to different sites such as Vimeo, Slideshare, YouTube. One thing to keep in mind about these sharing services is that they all have their own unique engaged audiences. (Please click on the image at the beginning of this post to get a downloadable PDF list of the top 10 places to post and host your videos and well as the poster.)

Once you have uploaded your video to the video hosting sites, you can then share them to variety of places. You can them embed them to your blog, other bloggers sites, your webpages, and social media pages.

Covered in this segment is the biggest take-way which is that your video builds web context by having linked it from the video hosting site to your website and to other sites which continues to build context to help search engines understand what the video is about.  This is where the descriptive content you put in the title, tags and description really comes into play, but don't forget to also continue to build context when it comes to your blog and website.  Don't just post the video by itself. Instead, make it part of an written article and create a compelling title, tags and include links to other related resources or web pages on your blog for the video. 

At Redberry Website Design, we call this driving them back home... and is key to owning your own traffic.

Distribution on Facebook

Finally in segment 3, we have a specific conversation about how to use this video distribution technique for Facebook.  Facebook is the one time that we recommend that you not embed your video to share it. You can of course link to a YouTube video on your Facebook wall, however a superior approach is to upload your videos directly to Facebook.

Here is why....

Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm determines what we see in the news feeds. For instance, it does not include your friends' latest accomplishments in Farmville that really does not make it into the top news that we see by default when we log into facebook. It selectively pulls out the most interesting things, and most important to you is that it gives video a little more weight. So if you upload a video directly to Facebook, it is going to get some extra visibility love from EdgeRank. and if your people are liking, sharing and commenting on your video and interacting with it. That is going to boost it even higher. 

Now here is where something really awesome happens...

Imagine that you and I are friends on Facebook and I upload a video and you like it. The people who you are friends within your network are also going to see the fact that you liked that video, and they're going to see that video in their news feeds. Best of all there will be a "like" button to my video in your friend's news feed and you know what if your friend is into digital communications then I have just been introduced to them via you, now they have the opportunity to become a fan of my business page, because the invitation is embedded in that video.  So there is a real tangible bonus when you upload video directly to Facebook.

So all of this is great, but please keep in mind that video is an excellent way to get relevant information to your audience, so make sure that your video has information that they want, like or will find interesting, and will want to share, like and engage. All content is not created equal, so try to make yours interesting and relevant for your target audience ...follow these steps and you will supercharge the online visibility of your video content.  

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Redberry Designs partners with you to make sure that the findability of your online business is pushed up to the top search engine ranking position.  Contact our team to get your project started today!  Click Here to Get a Quote Now!

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About the Author: Jannice Boyd Almansur (http://www.jannice.info/) is Managing Director of  Redberry Atlanta Website Designs. Redberry is an Agency that offers Branding, Website Development and Hosting Solutions and a full portfolio of business content marketing and brand identity solutions for small businesses. To learn more and to download FREE business tools and articles, as well as join their mailing list, visit the our BerryPatch Blog at http://www.redberrydesigns.com/BlogRetrieve.aspx?BlogID=419 and Redberry Atlanta Website Design website at http://www.redberryatlantawebsitedesign.com. You may print this article for personal use or republish it online only if it is left unaltered and in its entirety, including bylines, links and author information. Contact the author for all other permissions.

This is great news for small businesses and content marketers.  The team here at Redberry Website Design have been praising the value and benefits for small businesses to develop and implement a consistent high quality content marketing strategy.  

We have repeatedly sang the praises of content marketing as being uniquely well suited to small businesses because it is budget friendly - does not take a large investment. In fact, many techniques are DIY; It also removes barriers between you and your community and is shared with friends, family, relatives, colleagues (your community). Being an expert resource within a niche (you do one thing and you do it well) meas that you have many great tips, insights and strategies to give to your prospective clients and existing customers.  

Taking the steps to create, share and promote this information through your website's blog and other social media sites is the essence of content marketing and now Google is rewarding your efforts with higher authority search results. Take a moment to read this article below that I found today on HotFrog.com.  The author has done a good job explaining exactly what the changes to the Google algorithm mean to all small businesses.

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Google's latest major algorithm change puts emphasis on quality content

By Chris Lee

Google's recent 'Panda' update changed radically the way the world's most powerful search engine indexes and ranks websites. The good news is that Google now respects 'higher-quality content'; the question is just what does that mean for small and medium-sized businesses?

In April 2011, Google - the world's most influential search engine – amended the way it ranks websites in all English-speaking countries with an algorithm update called ' Panda '. Unless you follow search marketing blogs and news you may well have missed this story, but it is vitally important – and beneficial – to the online marketing of small and medium-sized businesses everywhere.

What Panda did was clamp down on so-called 'content farms', content-heavy sites that featured high up on search engines purely on the strength of their text-based content and links. Most of these easily-findable sites are designed to generate ad revenues from page views but the relevance of their content to the average surfer is often limited and leads them to leave the site to look elsewhere for what they really wanted to find. Sites regarded as content farms have seen their visibility hit significantly by Panda while other sites – particularly those with comments and interaction on them – saw their domain visibility increase. An early indication of the early winners and losers can be found on the Searchmetrics blog.

Panda: It's not all black and white

Many of the 'quality content' sites that saw their search engine visibility increase were newspapers' online editions. For marketers this is significant, as coverage from one of these sources will often include a link back to their company website, which post-Panda carries even more weight than before.

This is great news for marketers and their search engine optimization (SEO) strategies as it means that, so long as they continue to follow SEO best practice, they stand a better chance of their content being found on search engines. Marketers can continue doing what they should be doing anyway, which is creating compelling, optimized content that engages target audiences wherever they are in their buying cycle and that can be easily shared on social networks. Given that length of time people stay on a site is also taken into account, it is essential to draw readers further into the website with more intuitive and insightful content.

Perfect your content marketing strategies

Now that Google has done small and medium-sized businesses a favor by punishing content farms' visibility, organizations need to perfect their content marketing strategies to make the most of the changes.

This means not only creating great content - such as blog posts and how-to guides, video and audio content on your own website - but also seeding content around the Web to help it be seen and shared even more. This strategy should include things like posting presentations on Slideshare, uploading informative and shareable video content to video sites such as YouTube or Vimeo (which were classed as 'winners' post-Panda), and sharing content on social networks such as Twitter.

Organizations are often unaware of the great content they already have lying around in folders: presentations from events, reports, white papers. Why re-invent the wheel if you already have a stack of great intellectual property to share already? Think about an editorial calendar and creating content that matches the needs of your different demographic of target audience.

To be effective at SEO and content marketing in general, small and medium-sized businesses need to work out which keywords and phrases they need to focus on and generate relevant, compelling and easily-sharable content around those keywords and phrases. A basic introductory course from an SEO marketing specialist will be money well spent here if you're unsure how SEO works. If you're successful it will pay back in terms of search visibility, traffic and – ultimately – new business. Make sure you track the performance of your keywords on Google – as well as Bing and Yahoo – over time so that you can see which keywords and phrases you need to focus your content marketing on.

Marketing managers should familiarize themselves with Google's own guidelines on how to improve the search visibility of their own website. Google Panda has done small and medium-sized businesses everywhere a favor by punishing content farms, the challenge now is to create that great content that will make the most of the opportunity.

Disclaimer: The 'winners and losers' statistics blog was created by Searchmetrics, a client of the author.

Chris Lee is managing director of London-based online PR consultancy  Planet Content . He is also a  social media trainer , speaker and contributor to the University of Westminster's  New Media Knowledge  digital resource
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