It’s a beautiful thing.

Turns out a recent blog post on Pinterest Brand Pages was the workhorse. As of Friday the 17th, we were ranking 6th in Google, 2nd in Bing, and 3rd in DuckDuckGo search results for that keyword. We have very similar rankings for the phrase “Pinterest Company Pages.” We’re outranking a lot of authoritative sites like inc.com and Mashable as well, which is kinda fun.

From an optimization standpoint, it’s not terribly difficult to execute. You’ll need a little luck, no doubt, and it helps to be timely. Other than that, you want to have someone on staff like Jessica Conrad who can write super awesomely.

Here’s how to get blog content to show up in Google:

1. Write about something real and interesting
Pinterest is obviously on fire right now. We asked ourselves what our clients have already asked, which is, should we do this for our brand? To be honest, we weren’t sure, but we knew we should come up with a good answer (and then write about it).

2. Research a Keyword
We simply used Google Instant and saw that Google was suggesting Pinterest Brand Pages. This is normally all we do for keyword research, as it can be pretty difficult to rank for anything that registers in the AdWords tool with just a blog post. Plus, if it’s a newer topic, Instant is all you really have, aside from your intuition.

3. Optimize the post
Our content optimization is pretty simple. Put the keyword in the front of the title, and make sure it’s an exact match. Use supporting keywords where possible — in our case, the word “company” was intentional. Last, make it look and sound great. As any content SEO knows, the art is optimizing while still writing a catchy headline.

Next, add an exact match of the keyword early in the post. After that, write naturally, and verify that you’ve adequately sprinkled in your target keywords as part of the proofing process. Fortunately, you really don’t need to stuff your phrase to rank.

4. Be fast
Google seems to favor early movers. If you get there ahead of everyone else, you’re going to rank well, at least to start. Hopefully you’ll get a few links from people searching your target keywords, which will help you stay there.

Of course, it’s good to have a decent page rank, and we’re at a 4. You won’t be able to start a blog today and rank well immediately. At the same time, even a loosely established site can get content to rank if it’s timely. Rooster is still ranking 2nd in Google for the term Foursquare Demographics after a year and half, mostly because we were there early and got a few links.  At the time our site page rank was 2.

In case you’re wondering, the phrase “get blog content to show up in google” is a keyword phrase suggested by Google. It’s obviously not a hugely important one, but we’re in the top spot for that phrase an hour after posting. We might get one visit a day from that type of search, but you can see how much damage you can do by writing frequently and hitting it big once in a while.

Before we go any further, let’s quickly review the nitty-gritty. How does Pinterest work? Users can create online pinboards (like a bulletin board) for any number of categories—such as “DIY and crafts,” “food and drink,” “things to buy,” and more—and then “pin” items to them. You can pin content in three ways:

• By installing the Pin It button on your browser to grab an image from any website and add it to one of your pinboards
• By uploading directly to your pinboard from your computer or phone
• Or by repining other people’s pins

Easy enough, right? Well, businesses beware: Unlike broadcast channels Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest is not a tool for self-promotion, according to its pin etiquette. Instead, it’s designed for you to curate and share things you love.

So how on earth can you make the platform work for your brand with that restriction? There are a handful of companies that have begun using Pinterest to support the ideas behind their products, which is what Pinterest Co-Founder Evan Sharp believes is crucial. “For most consumer brands, the idea behind your brand makes sense on Pinterest,” he said in an interview with Mashable. Pinterest encourages a more holistic approach to marketing, and, if done well, it can be more effective than traditional marketing because consumers can really see how your brand fits into their lives.

Here are a few examples of companies that are already using the new visual social network to support the ideas behind their products and some other strategies you might consider:

Chobani: The yogurt brand’s winning strategy is to engage their community through recipe boards for treats that substitute yogurt for ingredients like sour cream.

West Elm: The furniture brand posts images categorized by aesthetic themes like “modernist,” “naturalist,” and “globalist” to inspire the designer in you—without taking an overtly sales-y approach.

Rent the Runway: The fashion-rental site groups its boards by occasions to help you craft the perfect look for any event.

As we’ve learned from Facebook and Twitter, running contests is another strategy for capturing the attention of your fan base. Recently, Land’s End Canvas ran a successful contest on Pinterest called the “Pin It To Win It” campaign. Users’ official “entry” for the contest consisted of a curated pinboard with 10 to 20 images of Land’s End apparel. With around 200 boards created for the contest, roughly 4,000 images of Land’s End merchandise were injected into the Pinterest feed at no cost. Running contests like this is a great way to expose your brand to a large audience, given the viral nature of these images and the engaged Pinterest audience.

You might also consider using Pinterest like a focus group. Since your company’s followers will volunteer a lot of information—by pinning products they love, places they enjoy, foods they salivate over, and things that inspire them—you can track what they’re pinning, see who else they’re following, and use this information to glean insights about your target consumers.

The addictive, visually stimulating social network has taken the Web by storm. According to SeedWalker, Pinterest often drives more traffic than Facebook and has already exceeded Etsy, Picasa, and Flickr in visitor count. In 2012, all indications are that Pinterest will be the new darling.

The wife and I recently bought a house and we’ve been making various purchases.  She’s been looking into furniture, and I’ve been researching ping pong tables and fire pits, among other man cavish goods.

I should state that these are clearly “informational” searches, as opposed to transactional (searching with the intent to purchase online) or navigational (searching for a specific site) searches. They are items that are typically researched online but often purchased at a physical location, as the cost is generally too high to make a commitment without first touching and feeling.

Here’s the rub: for social search to influence my informational purchases, friends of mine would have had to +1 a search result, or share a “ping pong” related item through Blogger, Yelp, Google+, or whatever else Google is allowing in its results.

Nobody I know has +1′d a “ping pong table” product on the Internet.  And why would they?  If they researched online but went to the store to buy it, they’d then have to go back online and find the search result again to +1 it. That’s simply not going to happen 99% of the time.

The “personal results,” meanwhile, give me a post from a guy who shared that he was eating his lunch on a ping pong table (and I had to scroll down his Google+ page to find it), an article about Tiger Woods taking on gold-medalist Liu Xiang in ping pong, and an article about the aerodynamics of a ping pong ball.  There are many more, none of them relevant to the purpose of my search.

Again, I realize that this isn’t the only type of search regularly performed.  You could argue that there are several sub-sets of informational searches, like looking for movie reviews and finding recipes.  A quick “The Descendents” search, for which George Clooney just won a Golden Globe for best actor, yielded nothing in the personal results. “Recipes” revealed several Google+ posts from Google advocate Denis Labelle, including a post that says “Google+ is the future of social search.” Strangely, I couldn’t find the post with the word recipes in it. Again, no +1s by any of my social connections.

Navigational.  Well, if I want go to YouTube and don’t think to type in youtube.com, I could search “youtube” and get there that way. Or I could just search “video.” Wait a second, there are some useful results here!  Some videos shared by the three people I know who actually use Google+—excellent!

Yep, no Facebook results, no Twitter results (yet). Google is saying it’s Twitter and Facebook’s fault they aren’t in there, but they seem to be missing the crucial point that they would be more relevant with them included, considering all the additional and relevant content it could serve (isn’t the whole idea of a search engine to organize relevant web pages?). As of now, there are simply too many search queries, too many search results, too many people who don’t know anything about the +1 button, and too many people who don’t get Google+.

Google has a massive task of educating the world about how this works, and right now it’s not easy to find any kind of value or reward.

The first improvement is a new banner that will stretch across the page just below the profile information. There, brands can display their company logos, taglines, or other visuals. By allowing companies to showcase their branding more explicitly, Twitter is making steps toward positioning itself as an ideal platform for companies who want a brand-led social media presence.

What’s arguably the most exciting new feature, however, is pinned tweets. You now have the ability to control the tweet visitors see when they come to your brand page by semi-permanently featuring a tweet at the top of your brand’s stream. This is particularly effective for messages that contain rich media, such as an image or video, since the Promoted Tweet (so dubbed by Twitter) will appear auto-expanded. This helps brands customize their page, promote important news or contests, and drive traffic to a specific video, photo, or link.

Twitter is introducing additional features that will further enable tweeters to connect with brands more deeply. The new ‘discover’ button will help you find content relevant to your interests and offer big returns to brands. For instance, brands that tailor their content to the interests and likes of their target audiences will inevitably gain a bigger following and experience heightened engagement with their followers.

The overhaul positions Twitter alongside Facebook and Google+ by offering a brand-friendly environment. If you’re especially keen on gaining access to the new format, keep in the know about the rollout progress, and learn more about the new layout, on Twitter’s advertising blog.

It’s kinda simple when you think about it.  Google wants to serve up relevant search results — giving customers what they want reinforces the value of the product.  Keeps them coming back for more.  Most importantly, keeps those ad dollars flowing.

A big issue for Google (and Bing!) is the plenitude of sites on the Interwebs that are poorly optimized.  In essence, these sites are failing to tell Google what they’re about. If these sites can’t communicate properly, Google can’t serve them up as highly relevant results to its customers (and allow them to make that cheddar).

Why not, then, deploy kind hearted SEO Ewoks and Wookies to help out?

White Hat SEO couldn’t be more kinder and gentler in its most simple form.  The mission, as previously mentioned, is to help sites tell search engines who they are and what they do.  Elementary things like doing proper keyword research and writing proper meta tags can work wonders for website visibility, among other suggestions provided by Google itself in its SEO Starter Guide.

In the end, White Hat SEO is a win-win for everyone involved.  Client gets more visibility, SEO guru gets paid, and Google indexes and serves more relevant pages (see: cheddar). Oh yeah, and with the completion of each honorable optimization project, the forces of good advance every so slightly over the forces of evil.

Image credit: Dryjack at Deviant Art

The most underrated part of Thanksgiving, however, may also be its intent. The purpose, aside from the food and beverage rites, is to give thanks to what we’ve been blessed with this year, and is arguably the most essential layer of the experience.  For Internet marketers, there’s a lot to be thankful for, and a lot to look forward to, and we all ought to take a moment to internalize our good fortunes.

With so much uncertainty in the economy, almost 10% of the American workforce without a job, and many of our parents and boomer friends suddenly having to rethink and reinvent the rest of their working lives (which will be the rest of their lives in many cases), Internet marketers are very fortunate to be making their way in one of today’s few growth industries.

The timing couldn’t be any better. Whether you’re an SEO, a social media expert, conversion optimization ninja, an e-commerce buff, or entrepreneuer, your prospects are limitless for the next half century.  Armed with a little confidence, a little knowledge, and a laptop, you can start something tomorrow (if you haven’t already) and take it as far as your ambition requires.

If you haven’t taken the plunge just yet, this might seem a little scary and make you a little nervous.  If you have taken the plunge and figured it out a bit, it shouldn’t be too hard to take a deep breath and re-connect to that rosy, engrossing feeling of opportunity.

It’s easy to take things for granted when you get bogged down by the day-to-day — bills, politics, corporate BS, conflicts of interest, unholy alliances, et cet.  But that’s what Thanksgiving is for, right?  It’s a Thursday at the end of November that uses food, drink, and football to liberate your mind from the nitty gritty and install a little perspective — to make you appreciate what you have, but also to relish the opportunities that await. It’s a nice feeling, isn’t it?

Improved brand authenticity. Timeline will allow businesses to tell a more authentic brand story through a better organized and more engaging way of displaying company information. In the new profile design, content from the current, rather boring “Info” tab will be relocated to the top of the Page in a clear navigation bar. In addition, a new infinite scroll will prolong the lifespan of information posted to the Page’s wall (In other words, posts will no longer disappear “below the fold” of the Facebook wall). This reorganization will not only shift the focus on content from quantity to quality, but also enable brands to strategically express what makes them unique today, as well as in the past.

More photos, more branding opportunities. We increasingly consume information through images on the web in the form of infographics, photos, and illustrations; Facebook understands the value of imagery and has made photos a central feature of Timeline’s design. Take the “Cover,” an image about 840 by 310 pixels at the top of the new Facebook profile. It’s the first thing a Page visitor will see and presents a huge opportunity for branding, raising awareness, and getting creative. Might it be the perfect space to display a shot of your new product or to make a promotional push?

Increased brand awareness. The benefits of Timeline for businesses would extend beyond brand Pages themselves. Most companies rely on recommendations, or “likes,” to increase their fan base, but those endorsements often get buried beneath more recent updates on a fan’s Facebook wall. This won’t happen with Timeline. If a fan “likes” or comments on a brand Page, it will be cemented on his or her timeline, giving businesses yet another opportunity to cash in on brand awareness.

Timeline’s release. When can we expect Facebook Timeline for businesses? The social media giant recently told Mashable that “Consistency in both functionality and appearance is really important to Facebook, so we hope to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future.” While Facebook has yet to confirm that brand Pages will employ Timeline, clearly there are many reasons why we hope they do.

The look. Are you curious about what brand pages might look like with the new Facebook Timeline? Check out these mock-ups created by Skinny.

1. Create Lists

Have you ever felt overwhelmed by the number of tweets in your main Twitter feed? When you’re following more than a few hundred Twitter accounts, your feed might seem more like babble than conversation. Finding the good stuff will take time, and you’re likely to miss what key influencers are tweeting about—especially if you only have time to check Twitter once or twice a day.

Organizing Twitter accounts into lists is one way to hone in on important tweets. You might create a list, for example, of industry leaders or media relevant to your company. But there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. It’s likely that someone in your industry has already created the list you need. So check out Listorious, a user-powered Twitter lists directory; it will help you find and follow lists created by other people.

2. Follow Hashtags and Keywords

You only want to read and share interesting content on Twitter, right? Right. Following hashtags and keywords can help you do just that. Consider using a Twitter search tool like monitter or Twitterfall to help you aggregate tweets by topic, find relevant information to retweet, and engage with likeminded tweeters. It’ll save you time, and help you expand your reach on Twitter, too.

3. Determine the best time to tweet

Here’s another time-saving tip: make tweets when the greatest number of followers will see them. Why? You’ll be able to make far fewer tweets and participate in many more conversations at the same time.

So when is the best time to tweet? Research suggests that users are more engaged with social media at the end of the week. That’s a good place to start, but a tool called TweetWhen will help you determine exactly what day and time your tweets gain the most traction. Another option is to use a social media management tool, such as SproutSocial, that uses consumer usage data to determine the times your messages are most likely to be seen.

Of course there are many other ways to save time and make an impact on Twitter–this is merely a list to help you get started. But if you learn how to use these tools effectively, you’ll become a much more efficient tweeter and have a better sense for which additional Twitter clients and time-saving tools will work well for you.

I selected the WordPress Mobile Pack plugin, which has very nice features, including:

• A Mobile Switcher
• Custom Color Variations
• Standards Adherance
• Device Adaptation
• An Admin Panel
• Mobile Analytics

And more!

The best part is that all you need to do is install and activate the plugin and you’re good to go.  Full gloriousness!  Nothing could be easier, except maybe finding car insurance using Coverhound.

Of course, there are a few limitations.  The pre-packaged theme may not work for everyone. E-commerce and accounts are probably an issue.  That said, WordPress continues to mature into a multi-channel publishing engine and full service content management system, and the mobile plugins are yet another reflection of that.