Google me.

In 2010, people googled the word "google" over 615 MILLION times according to comScore's 2010 digital year in review. This suggests that people in general don't like to use the browser address bar.  After all, "http://www" is not a very user friendly string of characters.  "Is that two colons and one forward slash...or was it two forward slashes and then a colon..or was it a back slash and a semi-colon?!"  Just looking at the many emails I get every day, people often have a hard enough time spelling their own name, let alone remembering how to properly format the syntax of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

So what does this mean for me? It means that first and foremost, before you start worrying about targeting keywords for your products and services in organic search engine rankings, you need to make sure that your company name and or URL itself is searchable. For the most part, this is relatively easy to do, and the search engine algorithms normally account for this.  For example, if you search for hats, in the top 5 results you get www.hats.com.  The same result happens when you search shoes or belts – www.shoes.com or www.belts.com will show up in the top 5 results.  But when you search for couches, www.couches.com is not in the top 5 results.  This poses a problem for the people that - although they have your URL, don't know how to use it.

The above statistic barely holds a candle to the nearly TWO TRILLION searches for  the phrase "facebook."  in 2010, Facebook grew to the 4th most visited web property.  3 out of every 4 internet users visits Facebook at least once per month. comScore 2010 Year in review also reports that "Facebook accounted for 10 percent of U.S. page views in 2010, while three out of every ten Internet sessions included a visit to the site."

Facebook is a great place to expand your marketing efforts to. Find your 'fans' and enable them to help you spread the word about your product or service.  Obviously ALL your customers aren't reachable there, but reaching out to the ones that are there is a great piece to a comprehensive marketing campaign.

Go ahead and Google me. You should get a few valid results.