SEO : Social Networking

The term Web 2.0 has been given to mean user-generated content, via:

• Blogs - articles written and posted by a user
• Forum posts - topics and replies posted to online discussion forums
• Social Bookmarking - tagging content for other users to find and appreciate
• Social & Business Networks - online & offline groups with a common interest

Social Bookmarking

You can often see these colourful symbols on web pages, inviting you to share with others. What this basically does is bookmark the site onto another site for others to see and reference.

Why? The idea is that when you are looking for something you need, rather than searching major search engines like Google you perform a search on the bookmark site itself, and see results which have the most votes.

Having a page with many votes can drastically improve visibility, website hits, and Google page rank.

Business Networks

Networks are a great way to get build your own personal brand which people can get to know and recommend to others. The principle here is not to sell to those you are connected to, but to think about reaching those people's contacts and network.

Business networking seems to work best when you give first and don't ask for anything in return. This good deed soon comes back to you, by other people recommending you and your company to others.

Twitter

This new micro blogging phenomenon involves people stating what they are doing now, in 160 characters or less. You can follow individual posters, and reply to any of their posts (or Tweets as they are known). You can send and receive tweets on a mobile phone, making it widely used and adopted by people not directly connected to technology.

People use Twitter for a variety of purposes, including:

• product and company announcements
• build buzz about something
• search for new prospects
• following celebrities & telling their mum what they want for tea!!

	Do... generate your own content - blog, post, twitter, bookmark - on a DAILY basis always keep your comments sensible and constructive openly refer and recommend others
	Don't... expect anything from networking - give first, and keep giving for a several months be negative - who wants to do business with negative people? duplicate your content - keep it fresh and the search engines will love you.

Ecademy - international business network Twitter - MicroBlogging website BNET - a good article site Digg - one of the original and best social bookmarking websites