Social Media is one of the most exciting aspects of SEO/SEM, I love it! This entry will just cover a few of the basics about Blogging and publishing. If you are not involved at least at some level, join us! We have several helpful topics on Blogging, Social Bookmarking and Social Media and will continue to follow it closely.
Social Networking and Social Media are powerful tools in your Internet Marketing, Brand Awareness and Public Relations strategies. This entry may be elementary for some and new for others but equally as important.
Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last 48 months or so, you know what a Blog is, you may know of a few highly visible blogs, and if you’re really with it, you own a Blog and update if frequently! Whether you own a business, handle PR in a corporate setting, hate this country, the elections, the war, meat eaters, the climate or republicans, the truth is, Blogging is like publishing your own newspaper from your home in your underwear. Its a great way to be heard regardless of what you write about!
“Freedom of speech and expression has never been so widly exercised by so many, so enhanced by technology, and so effective until the dawn of Social Media and all that it encompasses.”
To make this article relatively short and concise, if you are the owner of a business and you want to increase your public visibility, create multiple portals to your company and create open communication lines between your clients or potential clients; build a Blog, update it regularly, write useful and compelling content, and then promote it!
Where To Start Blogging:
1. Wordpress (Best Blogging Platform by far in my opinion)
2. Blogger
3. TypePad
These are just a few I would recommend. However, you can check out several, click this link to see how others rated various Blogging platforms. A lot of it is preference and usability but we think in terms of SEO with nearly everything and Wordpress has proven to be very good if not the best for SEO purposes. It seems to have a faster indexing time across the board than other Blogging platforms.
All right, sounds easy enough right? Well, the act of blogging is simple in its self but just like promoting anything else on the Web your Blog should be submitted to directories, optimized, and establish some authority before others will find it. Especially if its a stand-alone and not linked to your main website.
Social Media…how do you make the connections to your Blog and major Social Media sites and how is this going to help you?
Simply put, what ever you write on your Blog you are going to want to publish a snippet of each article and its URL and syndicate it across the web. Here is a great tool to help you do so…http://www.socialmarker.com. Simply select what articles you want to bookmark and publish on major sites and follow the interface instructions. You can select the “top sites” option to cut down on wasted effort.
This is time consuming at first, but once you get the hang of it you’ll love it and results can be very substantial.
Check back soon I’m going to continue to write about Social Media in greater detail. Maybe one article per site.
Have Fun!
Grat post jay.
For more tips on using social networks to bump up your web traffic, read my blog post on Carnival of Real Estate:
http://www.carnivalofrealestate.com/getting-traffic-to-your-blog-through-social-network-commenting/2008/09/