Social networking mainly focuses upon building online communities for people that share common interests and activities. Most social networking sites are internet based and present a lot of ways for users to interact, such as through, chartrooms, e-mails and instant messaging.

Social Networking has given birth to newer ways to communicate and share information across the web and these sites are being used habitually by millions of people globally.

Niche Networking:
Niche Networking sites are focused groups of social networks usually much larger in size and information. You can find a niche network on any topic you want to like learning a new language, finding old classmates, improving your business or simply making new friends.

Age Groups of These Networks:
People for some reason tend to believe that the social networking sites are just for teenagers and those in their early twenties. According to a survey; however, most of these sites have a community well over 30 years. Most of these groups simply make new friends or discuss daily issues and some actually succeed in building their own networking groups.

The Features of a Social Network: Almost all social networking sites come with the following features:
• The facility to set up and add a personal profile.
• Privacy settings that enable you to choose who must see you and who not.
• A facility that can block unwanted members from contacting you.
• Can upload personal blogs, articles, short notes or even photos for everyone to see.
• You also have the ability to be a part of a social group or community and add gadgets and social apps that create a viral effect to making new contacts and sharing information.

Advanced Features of a Social Networking Group Include Features Like:
• Creating groups with similar social interests.
• Uploading live videos.
• Geosocial networking where you can interact with people with similar geographic settings.
• Open ID and Open Social are two such networks that enable interoperability between two or more social networks.

Top Social Networking Sites:
Top social networking sites include, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, 43 Things, Windows Live Space – MSN, Gather, Worlds.com, Live Mocha, Stickham, Twitter and more.

What Can You Expect From a Social Networking Site?
There is a lot you get from a social network like friendship, a large community, help with your common problems, sharing things that mean the most to you like music, literature, photos, videos and albums. Could you possible get anything more wonderful than this in a ‘virtual’ world of social networking?

Online social media encompasses a variety of heavily interactive web sites, including MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Wikipedia, Digg, Twitter, and many others. More conventional systems like newsgroups and message boards are also part of social media. If you’re interested in getting involved in this type of media for marketing and/or SEO purposes, where should you start?

To some extent, the best place to start depends upon your skills. To effectively use social media for marketing, you should also be able to contribute useful or interesting material that grabs the reader’s attention. If you’re good at photography and own a digital camera or scanner, try using Flickr. People who are proficient at research and editing might get involved in Wikipedia, while someone with good writing skills may prefer posting on forums or making linked blog comments.

So what are some of the best social media sites to start with? For social bookmarking, Reddit.com has a very quick registration process and it’s generally easier to get your links noticed there (compared to Digg and Delicious). Although not often recognized as such, Yahoo! Groups may also be one of the best social media sites; it allows anyone with a Yahoo account to easily join and create groups where members can send out messages, respond to polls, upload files, and more.

Sometimes the best way to approach social media is to start your own web site; a subject-specific wiki, a “micro blog”, a photo collection, etc. This way, you will be able to gain advertising revenue and have more control over the format. However, successfully starting your own forum, video, or bookmarking site would be more difficult. Having your own site is better if you intend to earn money from your content, using someone else’s site is desirable if you want to benefit from links.

Overall, the right social media sites to start with depend upon your specific abilities and goals.

http://www.seobook.com/googles-relevancy-algorithms-change-keyword
A good overview of how SEO strategy and optimization is different for competitive keywords versus long tail keywords. When there are many matching search results for a given search query, Google places a lot of weight on core domain age & authority and on external signals of quality like link quality. If you are starting a new site and have built little to no offsite signals of quality you can expect to rank for longtail phrases first. As your site builds authority you can compete for some of the head keywords.

http://www.webuildpages.com/blog/sem-events/how-to-buy-links/
Lisa Barone live blogging from Pubcon in a Paid Links session with Rank Fishkin, John Lessnau and Aaron Wall. Todd Malicoat will moderate. Lisa metions the room is packed, paid links is usually one of the most attended sessions. Where is Matt Cutts and Michael Gray?

http://www.webuildpages.com/blog/sem-events/reputation-monitoring-management/
Another live blogging session post by Lisa Barone. Todd Friesen will moderate this one with speakers Jessica Berlin, Andy Beal and Lee Odden. Good information if you want to learn more about Reputation Management.

http://www.seobook.com/social-media-marketing-waste-time2
A rant by Aaron Wall at SEOBook regarding Social Media Marketing. If you are considering Social Media Marketing or trying to compare it to the more established Paid Search Marketing model, this is definitely contains some good thoughts for you to consider.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/is-the-googles-yoyo-effect-the-evidence-of-a-new-algo-
Speculative article of a possible Google algorithm update based on recent yo-you of rankings.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-we-help-track-flu-trends.html
I actually saw this on CNBC(??) earlier this week. While I’m not sure that Google Trends can actually predict flu outbreaks, I think they produce an interesting ‘real-world’ correlation that can potentially grab the attention of the everyday internet user. While the statistical data model might be flawed, you have to hand it to Google on doing something interesting with its’ data.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/blog-carnivals-link-building/7999/
Amy Smarty writes about Blog Carnivals. Carnivals??? Fun is usually dangerous when it comes to link building. Group Writing Projects…that sounds a little safer strategy even though I think it is the same thing. More information on this concept available at http://groupwritingprojects.com/

Using social media for advertising purposes can be of benefit, but it is more likely to prove effective if excessively promotional techniques are avoided. Social media web sites include such services as YouTube, Wikipedia, Del.icio.us, and MySpace. Here are some more details on using particular types of social media to your benefit.

VIDEO SHARING: Web sites like YouTube are often used to promote other sites, usually by displaying the site’s address at the bottom of a video or at the end of it. They can also benefit efforts to market a particular product by showing it in action. A few marketers use YouTube to host openly promotional videos linked from their sites as well, thus reducing bandwidth costs. A drawback to using this method is that it is somewhat time-consuming and requires audio/video recording equipment, along with relatively recent computer hardware.

ENCYCLOPEDIA: Using the “External Links” or “References” sections of social media online encyclopedias (like Wikipedia) to add a link to your web site is another way of using social media to benefit your promotional efforts. You can also add a new encyclopedia page about your company or product, but biased information should be avoided; it will also have to be periodically monitored to see if others make unfavorable changes. For the best effect, efforts aimed at using this type of social media to your benefit should be carried out in the context of making a positive, useful contribution to the system.

NETWORKING: Some companies create a profile at one or more social networking systems (especially MySpace) to promote their businesses. However, automated or bulk promotional methods should be avoided on social networking sites; this can result in account deletion, or (in severe cases) legal action. MySpace also has a job search feature, which businesses can use to benefit their employee-finding efforts. To list a job on it, follow instructions provided on the “Submit Feed” page at simplyhired.com.

BOOKMARKING: Using social bookmarking services for your promotional efforts is another option, including sites such as Sphinn, Furl, and Digg. It is more effective to submit your site’s recent informational or entertaining pages, rather than pages which are specifically designed to sell a product or service. It’s also to your benefit to submit links from other interesting web sites, and to avoid posting links from the same site excessively, to prevent being labeled a “spammer”. This technique requires less effort than using the above-mentioned methods.

If you are a small business with a small budget you still need to exercise a little SEO. Here are a few things you can do that won’t break the bank, but will still provide results.

First and foremost start with some keyword research. This helps you clarify which terms will generate the best traffic for your site. You can use free tools such as Overture or Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Or you can pay a small fee to use Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery if you have room in your budget for that.

After you’ve found the best keywords you’ll need to use them. Include these keywords in your website content. Focus on putting them in your meta description and title tags. And use those words to create relevant content. Also avoid flash if you can help it and don’t forget to include alt image tags.

Use social media to your advantage. Add a blog to your site. Join Digg, delicious and Squidoo to create an online presence. Share your videos on YouTube. You’ll create credibility and people will be more likely to link to you if you’re doing something interesting.

Join Local Directories. Search engine results are based on geographic locations. As a bonus, people that perform local searches are more likely to buy a product or service from you because you’re in the neighborhood.

Remember good search engine results are due to time or money. So if you don’t have a big budget put in the time and effort to learn SEO well. There are tons of sites out there that can help you do this even though it may take a bit longer than having an “expert” do it for you. If you do have room for a small amount of SEO hiring an expert can provide extra boosts to your results, but get the beginning stuff out of the way and let them help you afterwards.

SEO and SMO are two general website promotion methods, each with its own techniques and strategies. They can be combined or applied separately but simultaneously. Website owners or marketers may also focus on one of the two methods and ignore the other. Read on for details regarding both methods and a comparison of SEO versus SMO…

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the practice of optimizing websites and pages so that they will show up closer to the top of search results, thus bringing more visitors to them. It also includes making sure the search results will provide information which makes them attractive to click on for search engine users, as well as gaining inbound links on other similar websites, which also improves search result rankings.

SMO, or Social Media Optimization, involves using “social media” systems to promote a website. According to wikipedia.org, this includes using social bookmarking services (such as Digg and StumbleUpon), video sharing websites (like YouTube), blogs, internet communities, and picture sharing services to promote a website. Submitting a webpage to del.icio.us and encouraging visitors to the webpage to recommend it (perhaps by putting a del.icio.us logo link on the page) would be an example of SMO.

As to the question of comparing SEO versus SMO, the best method to focus on partially depends upon the individual website being promoted. SEO is less effective for time-sensitive pages, such as news articles; they are likely to no longer be relevant by the time when search engines finish finding and indexing them. Using SMO can more quickly attract internet users to such webpages. Some social bookmarking services, like Reddit, specialize in news.

On the other hand, SEO is often preferable (versus SMO) for pages with an entirely commercial purpose. For example, posting a link to a webpage selling portable television sets in a blog’s comments or on a forum would likely lead to it being removed because it would be viewed as “spam”, and such a page probably wouldn’t meet much success on social bookmarking services, unless perhaps if it was offered at an unusually good price or had very unique features. In some cases, SMO efforts can create inbound links which benefit SEO as well.

SEO and SMO both offer some of the same benefits, and are more complementary versus other promotional methods. Appearing near the top of search results, being listed as a Wikipedia source, becoming a highly recommended link on Digg, or having many inbound links from other websites all help to improve a website’s credibility, increase the number of website visitors, and don’t necessarily require spending money.