A simple way of tapping into the popularity and interactivity of social media is to create an account/page/group on some of the more popular SM websites and automatically post links to your articles/blog posts there.

- Create a blog on your website if you don’t already have one. It’s a convenient way of being able to quickly create relatively informal, concise articles that appeal to both search engines and readers.

- Create an account on your favourite popular social media websites. I chose: Facebook, Friendfeed, Twitter and LinkedIn.

- Sign up to an auto-post service – I chose: Posterous. This allows you to add posts to several destinations at the same time. Rather than posting articles via your website/blog, post through the auto-post service and as well as appearing on your website, a link will be added to all of your chosen media. It has an added bonus of making posting rather easy by providing a ‘post by email’ utility. If you use a popular blogging tool, such as WordPress or Drupal, you’ll be able to set this up very easily, but you can post to any website or blog that uses the MetaWebLog API and Really Simple Discovery.

- To have the links created by Posterous point to the articles on your website, you’ll need to set the ‘custom domain name’ (in settings) to your blog’s domain (ordinarily you would use this to create a custom URL on Posterous) and have your blog use the same basic URL rewriting that Posterous does, so it links back to the articles on your website.

- Make it easy for new visitors to find and connect with your social media pages by adding clear links to them on your website. You’ll find several plugins in popular blog software that make this easy.

- Remember that social media works best if you engage users and give them more of a reason to connect to you account than just links to your articles. It’s good to create discussions, join groups and in the case of Twitter, tweet frequently about related news.

- More short articles are better than less long articles. Writing four 250 word blog posts a week is a better way to build traffic and awareness than one 1,000 word post.

- Keep posting! The best way to make your website a useful resource and gain traffic by raising awareness of your website with frequent links back to your new articles. Don’t let the quality of your articles suffer though – your audience won’t remain interested for very long if the articles are poorly written. You can find more tips about writing content with SEO in mind in the various content articles on the Great SEO website.

Posted via web from Great SEO on Posterous

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