What do you need to succeed in social media? As Patrick Stewart, when playing Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Picard, so often said: ‘Engage’.

If you look on the popular social networks, you’ll see that the most successful users are the ones that spend time there. Even with celebrity users, the ones that build the biggest number of followers use the network almost constantly. More importantly, they reply to comments and generally try to get along with people. In the social media, as in the real world, the truly popular people are the engaging ones.

Could it be that simple? When it comes to social media optimization, it certainly can. The social media is all about connections made on a human level. Business users who only drop by to promote their SEO blog tend to miss out.

‘Engaging’ with your social media followers isn’t that hard. It can even help you to begin with your campaign. Simply begin by reading the updates, blogs and tweets of people that catch your interest. Follow this up with comments whenever something occurs to you. This activity doesn’t have to take up more than ten minutes of your day. By doing this regularly, you can’t help but catch the attention of other users, and this attention can later be used to further your online marketing purposes.

Spending time on your social profiles does great things for your social media management. Talk to your SEO company, or us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk, about scheduling social time into your search engine optimisation plan.

Good content doesn’t happen without planning. In organic search engine optimization, good SEO doesn’t happen without good content planning on a large scale. To judge by what’s commonly posted all over the internet, though, most people’s plans just aren’t going far enough.

Your content schedule shouldn’t just be ‘post article, post article, post article’. If you really want to keep the creative ideas flowing, and your business schedule in order, your plan needs to be a little more thorough:
*Monday: informative blog post
*Tuesday: personal reflection using daily business anecdote
*Wednesday: how-to article
*Thursday: review of new product, service or series of websites
*Friday: industry commentary on recent events

As you can see, there are lots of content types that work into an SEO plan, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. Your content plan should take advantage of every content type you can think of, and it should be thorough.

Just planning out articles isn’t sufficient, however. Take a look at a successful search engine marketing blog, for a good example of what daily content is required. An SEO content plan needs support in terms of social media promotion. In fact, your full schedule should look something like this:
Monday – morning: post new info blog, then tweet about posting and Facebook status update
lunch: reply to comments from first blog
afternoon: post personal blog, re-tweet comments from first blog

When you’re drawing up a plan for your content, be as thorough as you can.

Quality, research and innovation. These are the three things you’ll need if you want your SMO campaign to work. While at least two of these concepts may seem a little abstract, all three must be applied with a practical skill for social media audiences to pay you attention.

*Quality – it comes as no surprise to anyone connected with professional SEO services that quality is one of the cornerstones of a successful social media campaign. What this means in practical terms is much the same as what you need to achieve for your SEO campaign. Ensure that any content is written to a professional standard, widgets don’t fall over, and your target audience is kept informed and entertained.

*Research – before you can start building those quality offerings, however, you need to know what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for. Research is one of the watchwords for SEO and marketing, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. For social media, you need to know not just the bare facts about your audience, but also their thoughts and attitudes. Get your SEO company on board in uncovering who your target audience is, where they like to be seen, and what they like.

*Innovation – this last quality is possibly the most important for success in the social media. Many social media hits have been low-quality, last-minute compositions, but the quality all success stories have is innovation. If you want to be a hit in social media, get your thinking cap on.

Want to set yourself apart from all the other noise in social media? One way to attract attention is with a widget. Constructing a small but useful piece of software that your target audience can easily access is a classic way to draw attention on the internet, and it can work for social media, too.

Let’s face it, competition for attention on social media networks is ridiculously tough. Novelty is a sure way in, but it’s difficult to come up with novelties again and again. Offering something that users can make use of again and again is a much better plan.

Facebook is a prime example of this technique. Much of the activity on Facebook is generated by use of those cute little programs anonymous companies supply, as attested by the incredible success of Farmville. The cost to the user is access to their contacts, allowing companies to build their network.

You don’t have to be on Facebook to use this technique. Embedding a handy little program on your own pages and then promoting it in social media is another great way to catch attention and get people talking, and you can discuss this with us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk. This may take a little more work, but the benefits go beyond SMO and straight into SEO in terms of link building.

When planning out your social media optimisation campaign, think about what’s going to get you ahead. Look at what your competitors are doing, analyse their moves, and provide your audience with a different, more useful option.

It is amazing how much trouble unguarded comments can cause for a firm. Some examples, too embarrassing to repeat, have entered into corporate folklore. Reputation management has always been in part about preventing mistakes of this type. In addition, it has frequently been necessary to minimise any damage which has resulted from clumsiness. The advent and evolution of the net has made reputation management of this type more complicated.

At Searchengineoptimization.co.uk we are experts at online reputation management. This means that we are in a good position to assist firms with a need for this kind of provision. Outsourcing internet reputation management makes commercial sense because it is a specialist activity that demands expertise and experience in equal measure.

The modern problem with irresponsible comments is more difficult than it used to be because of the growth in the popularity of the social media networking sites. Individuals often use them in a personal and a corporate capacity and there is a lot of scope for error. It is also the case that comments made on such media can easily be misinterpreted as there is no potential for attitude to be conveyed by tone of voice.

Internet reputation management is also tricky because of several other tendencies:

• Journalists tend to use the social media to do their research. Any ill-judged comment may well end up being picked up and circulated on the local traditional media. If something is offensive, revealing or embarrassing, then it may be felt that it is appropriate to include it in a news item on the radio or in a paper, for example. It is also the case that a user may write to their local paper about the remark
• The social media allows information to circulate around it in a haphazard fashion. A remark could be taken out of context and it might be then passed around the social media. For instance, it could well be tweeted about and retweeted by individuals who are barely thinking about their motivations or the consequences of their actions
• There are bloggers out there who give little thought to accuracy. They vent their opinions on everything and nothing. If a member of a firm makes an injudicious remark a blogger who may have a grudge against the firm could well do something about in and use it as content. This may mean that a slanted version of events ends up in the search engine results pages doing a lot of damage to the firm’s image in the process

It may be thought that litigation could be the answer. However, whether the comment has been interpreted fairly or not, it could well be the case that legal action only creates additional difficulties in terms of generating negative publicity. Therefore it is always best to place the emphasis on preparation and on dealing with any issues with the minimum of fuss.

It can be shrewd to inform employees that they must be responsible on the social media. However, implementing an optimization campaign is also a good insurance policy to pursue alongside this.

In 2011, SEO had a strong content focus, and it’s not looking like 2012 is going to be any different. Google has gone strong and hard on changes to the algorithm to improve content quality in listed results. For any site owner serious about rising in the rankings, content must remain central – even when building links.

Even as recently as a year and a half ago, the best link building strategies involved contacting the owner of a target site and making some kind of arrangement. Although this can still be a good way to get quality links, there are now better, more organic ways. These centre on your content.

Why mix link building and content? Google’s changes should give you a clue. People are changing the way they interact on the net, and content is becoming central to all types of communication. Whether they’re on a social media network, sampling an online publication or shopping for new shoes, internet users are accessing information and sharing it like never before. These days, link building is as much about sharing as it is about making contacts.

Laying out plenty of quality content and publicising it via your social media marketing campaign is a method of link building that stays true to the principles of organic search engine optimization. It creates links that please the search engines. Handily, it puts your resources to multiple use as well.

In 2012, work your link building plans in with your content. It’s the smart way to get ahead.

Not many site owners approach SEO thinking that they’ll have to become a media influence. Unfortunately, if you want your site to get attention, that’s exactly what you have to do. As your SEO company will tell you, top rankings these days depend as much on off-site interaction as they do on on-site technical work. If you’re having trouble finding an angle that will work for your website optimization plan, don’t worry – there’s an easy way in.

They say that everyone’s a critic, and there’s certainly plenty of them on the net. For gaining easy attention, though, offering criticism is ideal. It attracts attention from all corners, including your target market and your peers.

Criticism can come in many forms. It might be a series of reviews of products, services or ideas. It could be a regular opinion piece that you publish on your SEO blog. Whatever form it takes, critical content comes with bonuses:
*Direct attention – your target market is more likely to come to you if you’re a resource on your industry as a whole.
*Links – sites, bloggers and businesses that receive a positive review generally jump at the chance to link to that review. Covering more than one influential person, business or site in a review is a great way to build a powerful link profile.

Reviews and opinion columns are a great way to open the door if you’re social media marketing or just trying to attract attention for your site. Talk to your SEO company about adding criticism to your content plan.

Ever considered the impact images on your website can have? Most companies would think of images only at the web design stage of their site, not afterwards. This can be a mistake, as images can have a big impact on your business image in terms of your online reputation.

Picture this. A customer interested in your star product runs an image search. Because you’ve ignored your image optimisation, the first set of images that appear consists of a couple of pictures taken at home by an amateur reviewer and the usual hodgepodge of slightly related images Google throws together. Your beautiful product photos are nowhere to be seen, and as a consequence, the customer is put off the product.

Image optimisation isn’t too difficult to add to your search engine optimisation plan. All it takes is a little thought about file names and sizes, and the usual application of keywords. If you really want your images to travel, it’s wise to think off-page as well.

As your SEO company can tell you, images have an influence on your website optimization as well, although this relates mainly to the way they’re captioned. Placing keywords in images can be a good way to increase your page’s keyword relevance, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

Images shouldn’t be simply placed on your pages and forgotten about. They are a valuable internet asset and should be taken into consideration in your SEO plans. Consider your images when you’re thinking about search engine reputation management.

If you’ve been investing in online reputation management, chances are you’ve purchased a few of your related domain names. The question is, have you done anything with them?

Parked domains are an old standby for any business that’s interested in protecting its reputation. Very few businesses can afford to operate more than one website, so it’s been easier, until now, to simply slap on some place-holder content and ignore these minor domains. There is still no harm in doing this, but if you want to make use of all of the internet assets at your disposal, you’re better advised to put in a bit more effort.

How to use parked domains

The essential word here is ‘parked’. Businesses began putting basic content on secondary domains so as not to lose them. This is a good way of keeping the domains under control, but not so good if you want to help your main site’s SEO, and you can discuss this with us at SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk.

*Develop secondary domains as mini-sites, used for promoting particular products or services
*Add some fresh content every now and then
*Begin to add them to your social media campaigns.

By putting just a little bit of work into these domains, you can turn what is essentially a drag on your internet budget into an SEO asset.

Having a few parked domains isn’t going to set your business back, but it does mean you’ve got business assets not being put to use. Talk to your search engine optimization company about your options for using secondary domains.

If you’re focussing on an organic search engine optimization campaign, you’re probably looking for ways to forge natural links. One of the best things to emerge for link building in the last couple of years has been the social media. The contacts you make during your social media marketing campaign can be a rich source of links, and here’s how to do it.

1. Seek out other businesses, and get excited about your business. One key to making your SMM campaign even more productive is genuine engagement. Give yourself time to get into interesting conversations with business owners in your industry. These business relationships are the first step to quality, long-lasting links.

2. Pay attention. Links are given on social media all the time. When you see a link being shared that’s relevant to your keywords, take note of who’s sharing it. Chances are, that social media user makes a habit of sharing interesting links. You can make use of such habits. Talk to us at www.SearchEngineOptimization.co.uk about this.

3. Build your presence. Your search engine optimization company is likely to have encouraged you to participate in social media to build up your reputation. This can help with link building as well. In building up awareness of your business, you are essentially enhancing your reputation. This makes link building a little easier, acting as a pre-introduction of sorts.

Social media campaigns bring about a lot of indirect benefits, and smoothing the way for link building is one of those benefits. Keep an eye out for opportunities.