• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, February 27, 2013

Some 83% of search marketers will focus more time on content to drive search performance in 2013, according to research released Wednesday.

The data from a BrightEdge survey of more than 4,500 brand marketers supports the demand for an integrated content management and natural, or organic, search optimization strategy and technology.

When asked the importance to empower content writers with embedded SEO capabilities in the brands content management system this year, compared with last, 23% said much more; 43%, more; 25%, about the same; and 9% said less.

Althought it's not new news, the data shows that collaboration between SEO experts and content authors continues to increase in importance. Knowing something and actually putting the strategy to work are two different things. Based on the market shift, BrightEdge built a tight integration between Adobe CQ and BrightEdge Content Optimizer. The platform launches today -- Wednesday.

BrightEdge CEO Jim Yu's enthusiasm about the integration points to help authors optimize content for search rankings, traffic and conversions. It's built into the Adobe CQ CMS to offer content authors recommendations that can increase the search performance of pages.

But don't think of content as strictly digital copy optimized for search queries. This is where the semantic Web becomes an evolutionary step, rather than revolutionary. Tom Simonite makes a case for the need to optimize real-world physical things that some might consider shared content in a digital life. It demonstrates the importance of connections between online and real-physical content. Making that connection will provide marketers with stronger ad targeting ties for paid and earned media in social sites like Facebook.

In Facebook's latest emphasis on finding ways to "harness the site’s hundreds of millions of members as a kind of human indexing squad, a flesh-and-blood version of Google’s Web crawler," we learn about the "entity graph," a companion to the Search Graph, where real-life things become outlines for online content. By the way, in case you forgot, Google's doing the same with Knowledge Graph.