How to go about using Social Media (correctly)

Many people will ask the question, how should they go about using Social Media (atleast the proper way). And they ask these things because they are either trying to promote themselves for a job or they are wanting to improve rankings for a website/online business. Because with social media they will have the chance to improve web-traffic throughout.
But before you even get started take the time to:

Map out a clear objective: consider such ideas as branding, networking, customer relations, exposure and trust.
Customer comes first: always consider yourself as the visiter/customer to the website and what they might be looking for and then take the step to impress (no matter the content of the site).
Focus on your content: Most people will get this confused with marketing, but if the content remains strong. Then the a well structured "content" will do the marketing itself.
-remember, as long as you have the well structured content that easy to understand and it easy to share through other social media, your readers will most likely share your content with their friends as well.
Don't over optimize: to avoid this, simply don't use the same anchor text and instead use different variations of anchor text for the links that point back to the main website.
Don't link to your homepage: It has become common sense not to have all of you links pointing back to the homepage. Instead they should be linked to the internal pages of the site toward the specific content the visitor is following. And compared the a neighboring website the one (hopefully yours) containing more "deep links (internal)", will show higher in search engine rankings.
Become a Valuable Resource: Stay away from being overlooked or deleted by followers by not self-promoting yourself to much. Instead, try sharing links to your competitors and become friends/equals with them, and in the long run improving you networking and inter-linking skills.
Social Networking: make a goal to locate every competitor on your level and to create an "inner circle". Giving you the opportunity towards interviewing and being interviewed, sharing ideas for help, and joint adventures. Stay away from asking for favors, or showing the ones that you might do. Instead, stick to commenting, following, and linking. By simply doing this, you will be noticed and your good deeds will be blessed with the kind of karma we all wish for.
Build Rapport: We may all be online reading similar things, but every individual will have their own personal thought towards each topic and taking the time to reply to others blogs, will give them a chance to see you as a true life form and not just the computer showing numbers.

So, in the long run be sure to have a "clear objective" and stick to it.

3 Ways Social Media Marketing Helps SEO

Social Media Marketing (SMM) has become a part of the search engine optimization SEO world because of it ability to draw in more reliable listings.

1) Getting quality, relevant inbound links

It’s no secret that a successful social media marketing campaign can result in thousands of new inbound links to your site. It’s also no secret that inbound links are one of the most important things that influence the rankings of your site. Put two and two together, and it’s easy to see how social media can be a great way to improve your rankings.

The best thing about this is that the majority (if not all) of the links that come from a social media marketing campaign are natural links; they’re not reciprocated, bought, or solicited

2) Using social media websites for reputation management

Lots of social media sites, especially the more popular ones, rank very well within the search engines. This can be both a positive and negative thing when it comes to managing your reputation.

On one hand, it is very easy to control the first page of results by leveraging these sites. Get people talking about your company or site positively on Digg, MySpace or YouTube, and you might end up with those almost as "good references," listings that show up on the first page of search engine results for your name, along with your own site.

On the other hand, if you’re not careful, it can be very easy for someone to tarnish your brand with social media. Take Comcast for example; if you look at the first page of results on Google for comcast, you will notice that there is a video on YouTube of a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.

3) Ranking pages on social media websites

Do you have a new site that you’re having trouble ranking? Consider trying to rank a page on a social media site instead. Like I mentioned above, these sites rank extremely well on the search engines. Their domains are very powerful and with a few links to an internal page, it has a great shot of ranking, even for competitive keywords.

So if you’re launching a brand new site and you know it’s going to be awhile before it ranks, you might want to consider uploading some videos to YouTube or creating a MySpace profile and building a few good links to it. I’m not saying it’s better to have these pages rank than your own site, but it’s definitely better than not having anything ranked.

source of this information at:
http://searchengineland.com/3-ways-social-media-marketing-helps-seo-10715
Written by: Cameron Olthuis

Search Engine Optimization

All I can really say at this point is, WOW! I mean, you can spend so much of your life studying different things and you turn a corner in your life. Only to have the chance to study about "Search Engine Optimization".

For the people that know me personally, they know that I'm pretty much a, "straight to the point", kind of person. And SEO, can be just that, but if you don't understand the operation of this type of web-media work, then you will just remain lost.

But when you do have the ability to understand it and put it to good use. You will find new doors opening, because you've now figured out how to put your media out there and attract the attention you need to broaden you career. GOOD LUCK