Ever since the popularity of social media sites has eclipsed Google as the most highly visited sites on the Internet, SEO strategists have been trying to determine how important the use of social media is as it relates to the way a website ranks in Google.

According to Jim Connolly, in an article entitled Google, Social Media and SEO, “because of the secrecy that surrounds Google’s algorithm, it’s not possible to say definitely what kind of additional influence this is having on search results.” Connolly goes on to explain why he believes that if you want to improve your ranking in Google you need to incorporate social media marketing in your SEO strategy.

Here is a summary of my setup for updating Twitter automatically from a feed using Feedburner.

• Acquire RSS feed – this can have many different sources. Mine is from my WordPress blog.
• Set up feed through Feedburner. Gmail account is required to login. This step will involve a variety of configurations.
• “Socialize” your feed to publish to a Twitter account – this step is part of your Feedburner setup.
• Verify that your feed does publish to your Twitter profile page.
• Extra: you can also publish your Feedburner feed on a webpage as either headlines or full content.

I would love to hear from others as to how they do it.

When I’m talking to clients and potential clients about their websites and online marketing strategy they invariably bring up social media marketing. It’s on every business owner’s radar – or if it isn’t, it should be. The amount of money businesses are spending on marketing on social websites such as facebook and Twitter continues to grow exponentially. New data confirms that facebook is becoming more and more popular with businesses worldwide and is even more popular than Google.

Social networking sites are the hottest attraction on the Internet, dethroning pornography and highlighting a major change in how people communicate, according to web guru, Bill Tancer, a self-described “data geek.” It’s a very interesting story worth reading.

Many of our clients have been asking about Google’s PageRank. What is PageRank?  As explained in this article, “Google ranks a page according to the number and quality of links leading to that page.” So every page in your website has a PageRank. For example, if a page in your site has 20 quality links pointing to it, it will rank higher than another web page that has only 5 links leading to it. “Quality links come from pages that are themselves ‘important’ (Google’s own terminology).

Google PageRank is based on back links. Back links are links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.” You might want to check out Wikipedia’s explanation of PageRank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank). It has a terrific diagram that visually explains it. So read the article and how to increase the PageRank of the pages in your website.