The press release is an often overlooked factor for online marketing success. Press releases not only promote your company/brand and raise your online profile, they can also increase targeted traffic by helping with your SEO. Specifically, the release can - in its own right - gain visibility in the web search results and the news search results (e.g. Google News and Yahoo News). And the release can boost your own site's rankings by building quality backlinks.

If you aren't writing press releases, you should be. Or if you are but you aren't optimizing them for search engines and for social media, you should be.

A standard, run-of-the-mill, un-optimized press release about a new hire or a promotion within the company won't do much for you on its own. Booorrring! I think I speak for all journalists when I say that I do not seek out press releases nor do I have any patience for pitches that are merely press releases. As a freelance journo who writes for Multichannel Merchant and MarketingProfs and various other pubs - and as a blogger - I get plenty of press release pitches and they only serve to annoy me. Even clever tactics to get the journalist's/blogger's attention like mentioning him/her in a blog post may not work anymore as we all have gotten a lot more jaded because of the ever lowering signal to noise ratio.

This means you have to be smart about the press releases you churn out.

If the news releases aren't terribly interesting, or if they aren't written with search engines in mind (and therefore are keyword-rich), or if they aren't syndicated to the right outlets, or if they aren't "optimized" to include key elements like text links and multimedia calls-to-action, then they won't be terribly successful at driving traffic to your website.

Here are some of the outlets you could syndicate your press release out to:

• BusinessWire
• MarketWire
• Prime Newswire
• PR Newswire
• PRWeb

All of the above sites offer various packages/levels of optimization and social media plays. For example, PR Newswire allows for embedded keyword-rich links which will help improve the search ranking of the linked page for the targeted key phrase. Note that other sites that pick up your press release from PR Newswire probably won't retain the links that you've embedded into the body of the release. So you're really only "buying" a link from PRNewswire.com when you pay the extra fee for the embedded links; but it's still probably worth doing. In addition to working text links into the copy, write the press release's title and body copy as you would any other search engine optimized copy. Do your keyword research using some of the available tools and include the important keywords prominently in the title and body.

Beyond the search engine optimization aspects, there's also the social media optimization that will help your release get syndicated into the social media realm. There's an excellent social media press release template you can use as a starting point, which will remind you to include such key things as:

• a link to your "News Releases" RSS feed
• multimedia call-to-action (e.g. "download white paper")
• photos (product pictures, executive's headshot)
• podcast feed and/or MP3 file links
• Skype and IM addresses
• link and RSS feed to a del.icio.us page containing relevant historical, trend, market, product and competitive content sources (which you should keep up-to-date so it continues to be a resource to journos who subscribe to this content source)

One last thing I'll mention about press releases... you should try to keep your frequency up too, just like with blog posts. A single press release per year isn't going to do much for you. Plan to push out press releases throughout the year.

I'd like to add some additional context to my last post on Social Media Power User "Hacks". In that post I provided some power user tips for social media marketing and optimization. These power user tips are meant to augment or supplement the necessary prerequisites of creating great content, being a valuable member of the social site/community, and being authentic your interactions (rather than deceitful or dishonest). Guerrilla tactics aren't a replacement for adding real value.

There are some ethical must-haves (underpinnings) of social media interaction such as engaging in meaningful conversation, instilling trust, being authentic, etc. Entering the social space without an internal moral compass is a recipe for disaster. Although such ethical must-haves wasn't part of my preso (you're rarely allocated more than 10 minutes to speak on an SES or SMX panel), don't think it's not important. It's THE most important thing.

Put another way, social media marketing isn't just a bunch of tricks and shortcuts, it's mostly about being adding value in an honest way, with the tricks and shortcuts added on to give you that little edge over your competition.

And when applying those aforementioned guerrilla tactics to gain the edge, you must exercise restraint and use good judgment. Don't just go hog wild and use every "trick in the book" and do it to excess.

Now consider this example of moderation versus excess... Sending a good friend a site with the StumbleUpon toolbar is totally acceptable. But compare that with sending an army of "friends" that you don't know a truckload of URLs to sift through. The latter is spammy, unethical, and reckless; you'd be foolish to engage in such behavior. You'd torch your account, burn relationships and ruin your reputation.

In line with that thought, you certainly don't need to employ the whole kit and caboodle of guerrilla tactics. For example, that tip for friending bands in MySpace may be totally unnecessary. Hopefully you can get to a critical mass of friends on MySpace without adding low-value friends (low value as in not likely to have meaningful interactions with you and not in your target market) such as all the bands and musicians that you like. But if you are at only a handful of friends and can't seem to get over the hump, it's nice to know that there's something you can do besides just sit and wait for people to friend you; you can proactively friend bands that you like. Granted an artist like Weird Al Yankovic isn't going to be terribly interactive with you, so at some point in the future you're likely to remove that friend from your ranks. Incidentally, that particular tip of friending bands came from a jewelry retailer I interviewed for the Marketing on MySpace article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year. Here's the quote:

...when starting off, you need to get Friends. It's kind of a bragging right on MySpace. If you have too few friends, it'll be tough to get the good ones—the ones who will end up buying from you. So, before you go after those, get a few hundred "bad" friends—bands are the easiest. They'll give you a respectable number on your Friends list, and will leave comments on your page—giving a little realism boost to your profile—making the addition of friends of the "good" type that much easier.

Finally, your focus in your social media marketing shouldn't be solely on gaining links. The links are mainly a byproduct of being a good social citizen. Of course they're still an essential byproduct nonetheless if you are an SEO. But it shouldn't be your main driver for participating in social media. Taking such a self-centered and short-sighted view will backfire. People will see through it. Operate by the principle of "pay it forward". Karma, in other words.

Live long and prosper.

From a social media marketing standpoint, YouTube isn't an ideal social site because of the way it hoards PageRank (video pages can't have external links on them, and external links are nofollowed everywhere anyways, including on your user page), so it can't be leveraged to increase your site's rankings in the same way that a site like Digg can. That's why a lot of SEOs and SMOs prefer submitting link bait articles to social news sites versus making videos for YouTube. When a video goes viral, it's YouTube that tends to benefit in terms of inbound links rather than the original site. So, if the link juice and thus the search engine visibility benefits don't transfer to your site, what's the point you may ask?

True, YouTube limits your opportunities to add external links and then nofollows them. But you can be at peace with that fact. Instead, get the YouTube video itself to rank in the SERPs. Long live Google's "universal search"!

With universal search, YouTube now wields a lot of power to rank in Google's web search results -- which means that getting into video is a good idea. Video blogging or trying to create something that has the potential to go viral can be a great thing for your business.

I especially love the "plus box" in universal search -- the clickable plus sign in a YouTube video containing Google SERP that allows searchers to watch the video right there, without leaving the page. It's a great opportunity to make a brand impression over a course of minutes, while the viewer watches your video.

So how do you optimize video content?

Obviously the spiders can't see what you say in the video so how are these things going to rank? When you upload a video to YouTube, there are a few important areas to optimize are:

• the title
• the description
• tags (keywords)
• and your YouTube username

What you call your video, the words you use in the description, and what tags you assign it, will make a difference when it comes to its ranking in the SERPs and for which keywords.

Step 1: When coming up with a good title and description for your video, remember to use the words you are trying to rank for. This might sound obvious, but it's just like if you were writing good titles and descriptions for a regular page on a site you were trying to optimize. Do not be too exact, but don't be too broad either. YouTube has the ability to rank for some fairly competitive words especially if there are not many videos about it. At the same time, however, if you title your video "Sports video" you're just wasting your time.

Make copious use of tags on your videos (assuming the tags are all relevant to the content), spread your tags out among your clips, use adjectives to make your videos more visible to folks searching based on their mood, have some category descriptor tags (bearing in mind that YouTube's default search settings are Videos, Relevance and All Categories), match your title and description with your most important tags, and don't use throwaway words like "and" or "to."

Your YouTube username is an often neglected but important piece, because it can drive traffic to your site and help burn your brand in the viewer's brain. Consider the famous "Will It Blend?" videos from Blendtec, where they blend iPods, rake handles, light bulbs and the like. Blendtec cleverly set their username to "willitblend.com" to promote their microsite. Granted, it's not actually an external link (it still points to a YouTube user page), but it provides bloggers and journalists with a URL to use in their blog post or article besides (or in addition to) the YouTube video URL.

Read more on YouTube marketing in this article I wrote for MarketingProfs last year.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Patel, leading practitioner in social media optimization, recently by phone and by email. Social media optimization is the new art of wielding tools, strategies and influence for the purpose of gaining visiblity on social media networks and sites like Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, NewsVine, Netscape.com, MySpace and even Wikipedia.

There was a great Wall Street Journal article in February talking about social media and the top influencers. Neil was featured as one of the top influencers on Digg.com.

When Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (a book I highly recommend, btw!), wrote about "connectors" and the power that they wielded to influence large populations of people -- to infect them with new ideas, fashions, fads and so forth -- I really think of people like Neil as the online equivalent. When Neil submits something on Digg, it can yield 20,000-30,000 visitors and cause the featured story's web server to crash!

Making it on to the Digg.com home page is a laudable goal for social media optimization but, as Neil points out, it is not always appropriate or feasible. Digg users are alpha geeks. They are not going to be terribly receptive to articles about home decor or feng shui.

StumbleUpon is another great social media network worth targeting. For those who are unfamiliar with StumbleUpon, it is like channel surfing -- but on the Web. There is a plugin that you install on your web browser that provides a button that you can press to channel surf. As part of the installation process, you select which topics you are interested in. Then, when you hit the StumbleUpon button, you are taken to websites which are given a "thumbs up" by other StumbleUpon users and which are in your areas of interest. I've found some really neat websites just by "stumbling upon" them.

Each social media site network has its own quirks and nuances and politics. Getting high visibility on reddit requires a very different submitter profile, story, topic and so forth than Digg. Getting visibility in Wikipedia is a real quagmire. Stumble Upon is certainly more straightforward than Wikipedia but it has its own quirks and tricks.

Have a listen to my 15-minute podcast interview with Neil, and also check out the text interview (conducted separately by email) which is in the Netconcepts' Cool Friends library of interviews.

Neil will be speaking at the American Marketing Association's Hot Topic: Search Engine Marketing, in San Francisco on April 22, NYC on May 25, and Chicago on June 22. I highly recommend attending. I'm chairing the conferences, so I'll be there too!