Step 1: Get Blogging
Now, the target="_blank">SEO benefits of blogging aside, blogs are one of the major search engine verticals. After all, they represent their own format of web content. The point is that if your company, its industry, or any of the keywords that you're trying to rank for have been blogged about, that content is going to show up on the universal SERPs.

It only makes sense then, they you start blogging. This way, you have better chance of showing up in the universal SERPs for relevant keywords, and an almost certain chance of showing up for your own name. This last point, moreover, is imperative for reputation management because every first page spot that you dominate is one less spot that a competitor or critic can have. So how do you get blogging?

First, choose a domain. In a word, you don't want to use a free-host because hosting it yourself will give your blog a much better chance of ranking on the first page of universal SERPs for your own name. Your choice and their respective merits and shortfalls, then, are:

1. http://blog.example.com - By hosting your blog in a subdomain of your own domain, the blog will automatically enjoy the same page rank as the the domain writ large. This will both fast track your blog ranking and will make it a more attractive piece of linkbait for bloggers trying to win favor and get a link from your own blog. The drawback of hosting a blog in a subdomain, however, is that general users are more apt to forget to drop the "www" in favor of "blog" and, consequently, "lose" your blog.
2. http://www.example.com/blog - For whatever reason, hosting something in a simple subpage makes it easier for users to remember. Unfortunately, the blog's page rank and corollary visibility will take time to develop, and so it will to get that content to rank for various keywords. Ranking on the first page of universal SERPs for your company name, however, may come easier if your company's name isn't generic or characterized by highly competitive keywords.
3. http://www.exampleblog.com - Now, creating a new domain altogether means the corollary challenge of building a page rank from scratch. However, there are two strengths here. First, among bloggers, the blog itself will have more street cred (i.e. blog integrity) because it will be perceived as a standalone initiative of the company. In other words, it won't look so much like a cheap SEO or PR tool, and so other bloggers will be more likely to both read and link back to it. Secondly, the URL is descriptive par excellence. This means that search engine will understand immediately that it is a blog about a certain subject. What you've lost in instant page rank, then, you've gained vertical SEO.

Once you've gotten that far, you have to actually follow through. There are tons of resources out there on how to run a blog properly. On of those is our own 6 steps to blogging, and five of those weren't mentioned above.

Step 2: Create Images
The next important vertical to address is images. Embracing this vertical, moreover, is a three step process.

First, every image on your site should be analyzed for meta information potential. Right off the bat, they should all be tagged with the company's name. They should be considered for any products or services of yours that they relate to directly. This, however, should extend beyond the long-tail. Product genre should be added. For example, if the image of a Ford F-150, it should also be tagged "pick-up truck."

The second step is to create a gallery on a subpage title "images." Here you simply want to add some interesting photos that your users might be interested in seeing. This can include products/services, facilities, and employees. These images should also be tagged appropriately. Furthermore, if any of these images relate to other pages on your site, you might consider including a link to that page or even making the thumbnail itself clickable.

The third and final step toward optimizing your site for the image vertical has to do with leveraging social media in your favor. Simply, upload every image you on file to Flickr.com and, again, append all the appropriate tags. The incentive to do so, here, it two-fold. First there is the viral exposure. This doesn't mean that you're images will be disseminated throughout the net, but they are that much more likely to be noticed and, as a result, so are you. The more that you're noticed, moreover, the more likely it is you get mentioned.

The second incentive lies in old fashioned indexing. Basically, Yahoo has begun to crawl and index Flickr. Granted, what Yahoo indexes here won't result in a link to your site on a Yahoo image search. However, it will help considerably in controlling what images become likely to be associate with your company name on both image and universal searches.

Step 3: Make Videos
If you think that producing video is an endeavor that is infrastructure-intensive, then I have three words for you: user generated content. It's like one of Edelman's Directors, Richard Kerr, said during a conference: "the shaky cam is now seem as the most trusted form of media”.

More to the point, however, there are too many video production options out there for your company not to in on at least one of them.

Basically, look at what you have, consider what else you can produce ASAP, and upload it to YouTube. The reason you want to consider YouTube is because Google indexes YouTube regularly. Consequently, like the images you uploaded to Flickr, you will also want to make sure that the appropriate tags are appended to these videos. Again, these tags should include both company name and the keywords for which you would like to see both the company and the video rank.

Uploading your video content to YouTube has an additional advantage: the viral effect. Simply put, the fact that users are able to obtain an embed code means that it is possible for your content to spread across the web. This, of course, is no guarantee that it will. But there very fact that the potential is there means that it should be passed up. Besides, every time that video is linked to or embedded, Google considers it to be more relevant for the keywords with which you tagged it.

Another consideration to be made about the video vertical is the array of other video hosting/sharing sites that are out there. Each of them features its own peculiar model and community, so finding a community that would be open to your message, brand name, and/or product line is one that you might want to engage with your video content.

For example, if you already have a group around your brandname on MySpace or Facebook, you should upload your content to those sites as well. If you don't, you should be asking yourself whether such a group would compliment your other marketing initiative, but that's a topic for another post.

Step 4: Blog Your Content
So now you're blogging, and you've created, uploaded, and disseminated a variety of multi-media content. What all this content is also good for, however, is blog content. This will help raise awareness and gain exposure for all your multi-media content. The more attention that it gets, the better that it ranks in each of its own verticals, and so the better that it ranks in the universal SERPs.

For starters, your images will serve as a great pool of stock photography for blog content that pertains to either company news or industry trend. Furthermore, if you're generating images on an ongoing basis (and you should be), you'll have the perfect pretense to blog about the context in which a given photo was taken. Similarly, a picture is worth a thousand words, so on days when you're short on content to publish, a passing word followed by a striking image is just the thing to make sure that the blog is updated despite your lack of inspiration or time. To all this, add that embedding any image on an additional page creates an opportunity to re-affirm the meta-information that you had initially appended to it.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, moreover, then a moving picture with sound is probably worth a billion (that's a thousand multiplied by itself for each extra layer of media it has over mere images). In a word, your video content can often make for blog content itself. Again, then, you'll be able to both promote content that users/clients might not have otherwise known was out there, and be able to productively recycle content for your own universal SEO gain.