The importance of good site search cannot be overstated. A well performing site search improves your customers' online experience and helps them find products and information more quickly, and the more data you include in the search results, the easier you make the visitor's purchasing decision. Following are four quick steps you can take that will ensure your site search has an even stronger impact - both on your customers' experience and on your bottom line.

Video is all over the place. It is great for the audience. It is great for marketers too, but it takes up computing space. Lots of it. This is a serious problem that will impact creative marketing and advertising departments in particular. Video is quickly supplanting everything else as the method used to spread whatever gospel needs to be spread online and beyond. However, these bigger digital files are causing bigger headaches all the way around.

There are a number of reasons social media appeals to today's marketers: it's affordable, it's engaging for consumers and it's immediate. However, the real appeal of digital social marketing has been driven by new applications of data for targeted messaging and features that resonate with users. One recent example of this is TVGuide.com's September 16 launch of a widget using Facebook Connect, an open API from the social networking site.

Since search marketing is still a relatively young discipline with few truly veteran players, every day many bright young practitioners are getting promoted into their very first management roles. As I think back to my first managerial position, I cringe at the awful rookie mistakes I made, and savor the advice that more experienced managers gave to me that helped me get through the rough spots. Today, I thought I would share the one single insight that has helped me more than any other to improve my management skills.

Marketing executives are aware that their brands are no longer entirely under their supervision. Conversations and relationships among consumers are driving forces in determining the long-term health of their brands.

Online advertisers, more than anything else, seek quality referrals from their Web-based affiliates. Think about it: do merchants want "window shoppers", or people who are serious about buying? To attract prospective purchasers, you need serious, high-quality content that satisfies the reader's need for information.

A year's worth of research conducted by Google TV has little to offer in terms of consumer viewing revelations, but the program has much to offer DRTV advertising executives. In fact, those looking to improve client results and saving both agencies and clients money should make the research a must-read.

Cooperative marketing -- advertising and promotional programs in which a manufacturer supports the advertising efforts of a retailer -- has seen extensive success in the offline realm. However, considering the sheer mass of audience data and publisher complexity involved, aggregating and using this data in a meaningful way has been nearly impossible to date. Today, technology has finally caught up to the market need for digital co-op marketing.

If you haven't made significant changes during the past year to the way your Google AdWords account is set up and managed, you're leaving money on the table. Google calculates Quality Scores for your ads with the goal of increasing relevance to a searcher's query, and it is imperative to organize your account to convey the highest relevance possible.

In February, Facebook asserted ownership over anything its members posted — the unspoken message being that to access their content, users would need to stay on Facebook, where Facebook can monetize them. Not surprisingly, this move was not well received by users. To its credit, Facebook immediately pulled the plug on this aggressive policy.