Following the advice of social media and Web 2.0 experts, you have established your own blog and joined a number of social sites, including Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, LibraryThing, and Upcoming.org, among others. Now, the experts say you must add content to each of these accounts regularly to keep them dynamic. So, how’s this supposed to make your life easier?

Relax. With some careful planning, you can streamline the process of keeping all of your Social Web accounts fresh and engaging without breaking your back or the bank. The trick is to make your social accounts work together. Most social sites use the concept of open source to make it easy for developers to write applications that enhance the features of the site. For our purposes, we will look at applications that can help us streamline our existing presence in the Social Web.

To demonstrate what I mean about streamlining the process, I’ll start with an example. Imagine that you have the following social media tools and accounts already in place on the Social Web:
A WordPress Blog
A Facebook Profile
A Facebook Page
A MySpace Page
A YouTube Account
A Flickr Account
A Twitter Account
An Upcoming.org Account
A GoodReads Account

Your 6 Step Plan to a Streamlined Social Web Presence

Step 1: Optimize Your Blog Feed

The very first step in streamlining your presence in the Social Web is burning your blog’s feed to Feedburner. This is a free service, and obtaining a FeedBurner.com account will help you to easily manage and track your feed subscriptions. Once you have burned your feed to FeedBurner, note the URL of your new feed, which will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyBlogName .

Step 2: Feed Your Blog Now

You want to make sure that you are getting the most mileage from your blog posts. To do so, feed your blog entries into all of your social accounts that offer blog feeding applications. Remember that each social site may provide its own different way of accomplishing this.

Facebook, for example, allows you to feed your blogs into the Notes section of your Facebook page. Click Edit in the Notes box of your Facebook page and find the option that allows you to import notes from an external blog.

Feeding blog entries into MySpace is a little different. Find and add the application RSS Reader. You can access many MySpace applications by clicking More/Apps Gallery from the main menu of your MySpace homepage.

It is possible to feed your blog posts into Twitter, but blog posts are typically too long for this purpose. If you read on, I will clue you in to a better solution for streamlining your micro-blog entries.

Step 3: Maximize the Use of Your Multimedia

Maximize the exposure of your images and video clips by adding galleries and badges to your blog or Website, and by feeding your images and videos into your social networking profiles and pages.

WordPress has many plugins available for integrating Flickr images. My favorite right now is Flickr Tag, a plugin that allows you to easily place your Flickr images right into your blog posts, and create galleries.

A Flickr badge is a snippet of Flash or HTML code that you can place on the sidebar of your Website or blog that will pull in and highlight random or specific photos from your Flickr account. Find out more by going to: http://www.flickr.com/badge.gne.

Similarly, you can embed video galleries into your blog or Website by using your YouTube channels. After you’ve added videos to your YouTube channel, you can generate code for a video gallery and place this code on your Website or blog.

To feed images from Flickr into your Facebook page and MySpace profile, find the appropriate application and add it. For Facebook, I use an application called My Flickr; for MySpace, use Happy Flickr.

You can place videos on your Facebook page by implementing an application called YouTube Box, and using the application YouTube Favorites, you can display video clips on your MySpace profile.

Step 4: Integrate Other Social Tools

The way in which you proceed in step 4 depends entirely upon which social tools and Websites make up your Social Web presence. In the example I have created, we have accounts with Upcoming.org (a social event calendar) and GoodReads (a niche book sharing and author site) that have not yet been integrated. By searching the applications in Facebook and MySpace, you’ll find that Facebook offers an application that allows you to integrate your Upcoming.org events, and both Facebook and MySpace include applications that allow you to display your GoodReads books and book reviews.

Step 5: Take Advantage of Streamlining Tools

Using the social tool, Ping.fm, you can add short posts to your mini feeds on Facebook, MySpace, and your micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Jaiku. Ping.fm is a useful tool that lets you post one brief entry, or often a status update, and feed it into a number of social sites.

Step 6: Research and Repeat

The very nature of the Social Web is connecting people through social platforms and applications; therefore, when deciding whether or not to invest time and resources into a new social tool, it’s best to research the ways that tool will accommodate your existing Social Web presence. Can you feed in your blog posts? Does it allow you to import images from a photo sharing site or video clips from from your video sharing community? Have sites like Ping.fm integrated the new tool yet, or do your existing social sites offer applications to integrate the new tool?

When you do decide to integrate a new social tool or Website, do so as best you can by repeating the applicable steps presented above.
By Deltina Hay principal of Social Media Power (c) 2009

make sure that your current website is up-to-date. The following checklist will help you:

Step 1: Check your company information

Does your about page draw a current picture of your company? If you have a staff listing on your website, is it up-to-date?

Check these pages as well as the copyright notice and the privacy police of your website to make sure that your web pages don’t look outdated.

Step 2: Check your contact information

Does your website list your current phone and fax numbers? Are the mailing and email addresses listed on your website correct? You’ll lose customers if your contact information is outdated.

You should also check the email addresses that you use on your website. Are help@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, order@yourdomain.com, etc. redirected to the correct recipient? Send test email messages to all addresses that are listed on your website.

Many businesses have so strong spam filters that many legit customer email messages don’t reach them.

If you have contact forms on your website, make sure that they work and that they are easy to use. If someone doesn’t enter a correct email address in your contact form, does the error message make sense?

Step 3: Check your auto-responders

Do you send automated confirmation messages when someone sends you an email message? Does your shopping cart send email messages after an order?

Check the text of your automated messages to make sure that it says what you want to say and that is contains current information.

Step 4: Check the links on your website

The older your website is and the more pages your website has, the more likely it is that it contains some broken links. For that reason, you should regularly check the links on your website.

About three weeks ago, Microsoft was granted a new patent with the name Web Spam Classification Using Query Dependent Data. Although this patent application was filed by Microsoft, all major search engines probably use similar methods to classify web pages.

How do search engines analyze web pages?

Search engines look at a number of elements that can appear on web pages and within queries that web surfers use to find these pages.

For example, search engines may look for the most frequent keyword in the web page, the number of times a particular keyword appears in the web page, the domain name associated with the web page, the number of links pointing to the page, the HTML tags in which a keyword appears and many other factors.

The patent filing indicates that search engines look at hundreds of different factors to rank web pages.

How search engines try to detect spammy pages

The are so many potential spam pages on the Internet that search engines cannot identify all spam pages manually.

To identify potential spam pages, search engines might manually label some web pages as spam and then take information from that pages to find other spam pages.

For example, a web page that uses keyword stuffing has more keywords than a legitimate page. By training the spam detection algorithm with a few web pages that use keyword stuffing, other web pages that use keyword stuffing can be detected automatically.

In other words, a spam detection algorithm labels web pages as spam or not spam by looking at decisions made by humans. According to the patent application, the algorithm might look at the following factors:
the number of inbound links coming from labeled spam pages
the top level domain of the site
the quality of phrases in the document and density of keywords (spammy terms)
the count of the most frequent term
the count of the number of unique terms
the total number of terms and the number of words in the path
the number of words in the title
the rank of the domain and the average number of words
the top-level domain
the number of hits within a domain
the number of users of a domain
the number of hits on a URL and the number of users of a URL
the date the URL was crawled, the last date page changed
many more factors

If your website uses similar elements as the spammy web page then it’s likely that your website will be classified as spam. The usual impact of a website being labeled as spam is that the site might be pushed down in search results, or removed completely.

What does this mean for your website?

You should make sure that your web pages use similar elements as the top ranked pages instead of elements that can be found on spam pages.

The easiest way to make sure that your web pages use all the elements that are used by top ranked pages is to analyze your pages with IBP’s Top 10 Optimizer. IBP will analyze all important elements of your web pages and it will tell you in plain English what you have to do so that your web pages get top 10 rankings.

If search engines label your website as spam you will lose a lot of visitors and customers. You should analyze all elements of your web pages to make sure that search engines label your web pages as high quality content and not as spam.