For any business hoping to get a foothold in the highly competitive marketplace today, press release is one of the most effective weapons in their company's marketing armory. Given the potential of the press releases for generating spotlight for a business, it's curious to see how less than half of the small and medium sized companies create press releases and, how even fewer actually do it right.

It might be a cliche to say that the Internet has democratized the access to world-wide channels of communication, but that doesn't make it any less true – on the contrary, it's a cliche because it's so true. For small businesses, online press release is a great way to reach thousands of media outlets and create a strong presence in the market.

Online news sites including some of the most popular ones such as Yahoo and Google news are now offering a huge number of press releases to their users. Indeed, reports suggest that hundreds of millions of users accessing the news sites are now exposed to online press releases every month. This means that companies focusing on creating press releases whenever they have something newsworthy to report can create precious opportunities for generating new business for themselves.

An often overlooked benefit of the online press releases is their power to generate backlinks for a website. Backlinks have a symbiotic relationship with the search engine optimization of a webpage because they're an important factor used by the search engines to determine the credibility of a website. Press release distribution services often have content sharing agreements with other websites, which means that the press release created by a company can end up on many different news sites. If a company creates a great press release containing something that might be relevant and useful to the general public, there's a chance of it getting picked up by major news outlets, which in turn can attract a lot of traffic to a website.

Social media has added a whole new dimension to what the online press releases can achieve in accomplishing the marketing goals of a company. By creating interactive press releases that contain something that their fans and followers care about, companies can now communicate directly with their users and enlist their help in reaching potential customers.

Online press releases usually have a longer life-span than traditional press releases, which means that they can keep attracting traffic and offering "link-juice" to websites for a long time. Even with all the benefits of the online press release marketing, it is still way less expensive than any of the traditional marketing methods. It is, therefore, not surprising at all that companies are increasingly focusing on distributing their press releases to the users of the World Wide Web alone.

In recent years, internet marketing has become one of the most important elements of a company's overall marketing strategy. With every product and service facing a cutthroat competition in the market, companies can ill-afford to overlook the importance of their customers online and not have an effective strategy in place to reach them. Within the online medium there are now quite a few channels and techniques that the companies can use to reach their constituents. These include Email Marketing, Affiliate Marketing, Social Media Promotion and, probably the most important, Search Engine Marketing (SEM). There's a reason why SEM is so vital for a company to focus on - most websites relying on e-commerce get almost 65% of their traffic from search engines. For content-based websites, the percentage of people coming from search engines can be more than 85%. SEM is the approach that incorporates all the techniques including search engine optimization (SEO) which are used for attracting traffic from different search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. Confusion arises when people merge the two terms and employ them interchangeably. According to marketing research and practice, however, the difference between SEM and SEO is quite clear.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a much broader concept than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEM covers all the activities that a company uses to attract traffic through search engines. SEO, therefore, is only a component of SEM. Other components of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) include search engine advertising such as pay per click, paid submission to search engines and directories, as well as reputation management in search engines. SEO, on the other hand, focuses on improving the website's visibility in organic search results alone. The goal here is to allow the search engines to find the website and rank it high against different keywords. When people talk about the two terms, SEO and SEM, together, they're referring to SEO as the process of improving a website's visibility in organic search results while the SEM, in this context, refers to contextual advertising, paid placement and paid inclusion etc.

As part of a website or a company's online marketing campaign, both SEO and SEM have their own advantages. SEM, for example, allows companies to advertise their websites or products using several keywords, delivering immediate traffic. Most importantly, it gives them the ability to scale it up or down whenever they want. SEO, on the other hand, focuses on appearing in natural listings and is, therefore, a more stable way of attracting traffic to a website. In most cases, it also costs less than the other SEM techniques. However, it takes longer for SEO to start delivering traffic to a website, and usually it's possible to be competitive only for a handful of keywords, especially when it comes to the more popular ones. Paid listings are most often created manually and the way they're structured usually represents a responsiveness and sensitivity to the situation with regard to the consumer’s intent. Search engine optimization, on the other hand, is a source of information generated algorithmically and is, therefore, usually unskewed by any bias.

The term 'long tail' was coined by Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired Magazine in 2004. Long tail queries are those search engine keyword queries which are more targeted than the general keywords. Website publishers, as well as marketers have realized the potential of long tail queries that are triggered few times but can generate a lot of revenue for websites. The trend has been led by a change in the way people try to find content on search engines. According to Google every fifth search performed on their search engine is unique. By focusing on long tail queries, websites can offer a better customer experience to their users. Following are some of the tips for optimizing your site for long tail queries:

• Use Google Keyword tool: This tool helps you find the relevant keywords for any search term. You can also find how many searches are performed for each of the keywords in a month. You can use this tool to identify long tail keywords and then try to optimize your site for them.
• Unique content: Make sure the content of the website is unique and is informative for the readers. Remember to use long tail keywords in sentences. e.g. if your website is about weight loss, it's advisable to offer content for search terms such as "best diets to lose weight",  "effective ways to lose weight", "lose weight in 15 days" and so on.
• Meta tag keywords: Always try to meta tag the keywords so that it is easy for search engines to find them. You can meta tag the main keyword and the long tail keywords at the same time.
• Backlinks: the long tail keywords can be used while making backlinks. This will help improve the rank of the page where the content is located, improving the flow of traffic to your website.

Most online marketing experts only focus on Google when creating a strategy for online marketing and search engine optimization. The main reason for this is that Google is by far the number one search engine which controls more than 60% of the search market. Most websites receive up to 80% of their traffic from Google alone.

For a marketing expert, however, it is important not to overlook other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing. These two search engines now control almost 30 percent of the search engine market. Since Yahoo also uses some of the search technology developed by Bing, it is important for businesses to focus on ranking high in Bing also. As with any search engine, website operators have to understand how Bing works in order to optimize their websites for it. Here are some of the things that Bing focuses on.

Age of the domain
Age of the domain carries a lot of weight for Bing. Websites that have been in operation for a long time tend to rank high in Bing. Just like Google, Bing also likes to establish the authority of the content it shows on its results page, and the age of the domain is one of the factors that determines this authority for Bing. For marketers, this means that while there might be no immediate payoffs, persistence is likely to bear fruit.

Link building
Link building is also a very important part of SEO on Bing. While the inbound links establish the authoritative nature of the content, the outbound links establish its usefulness to the readers. Links, therefore, should always be pertinent to the content displayed on the page.

Quality content
Bing also uses algorithms just like Google to scan the content of the webpage in order to determine its quality and to identify any black hat techniques used by businesses to boost their search engine ranking. Website operators need to focus on providing fresh, quality content in order to improve their page rank.

Google is the leading search engine in the world with a share of over 65% of the search market. One of the reasons for Google's popularity with the users is the fact that it keeps improving its search functionality by updating its algorithm in order to make sure that its users find whatever they're searching for.

Most of the changes Google makes go unnoticed by the average user but they usually make a huge impact on the website rankings. Whenever Google makes a change to its algorithm, there are always winners and losers.

The latest change was made by Google on 3rd November 2011. The update is being referred to as Caffeine algorithm or Google's Freshness Update. As the name suggests, the update focuses on the freshness of information posted on a website while showing it on Google's results page. The update represents a significant change in the search engine's approach. Most SEO experts think that it should be interpreted in the context of the popularity of Web 2.0 websites. This update affects almost 35% of the searches.

This Freshness Update has negatively affected the websites maintained by small businesses since they're usually the people who have static websites. They usually don't have the resources to keep their content fresh and consequently, they're now showing up lower in search results.

In order to take advantage of the Freshness Update, websites operators need to focus on adding content to their websites on a regular basis. Small businesses can also make their blogs a part of the website in order to keep their content fresh. Widgets showing content from their social media profile pages can also be added as dynamic components of their websites. All these changes can go a long way in ensuring that your website benefits from the update and receives a lot of traffic from the search engine.