Yes Social Media is officially here, 500 million worldwide facebook users and growing makes social media the new buzz term in the industry.

So how exactly can you exploit it for your site/business to gain full advantage.  You will notice on lots of sites, that social bookmarking sites are popping up, or people are asking you to add them on facebook, or follow them on Twitter.  But ultimately, social media is very much the same as content on your site, in that it will only be interacted with, if its informative or interesting.

Make sure that if you are opening yourself up to a social media community, you are constantly aware of what is going on, and that you are able to react to both positive and negative comments quickly.  You will soon learn how quickly a story can snowball in a small community, and grow like a bushfire through the use of a platform like Twitter !!

Embrace the future, but beware of the pitfalls !!!

Lots of wordpress hacks been going on recently, so its important that you ensure if you have a site or blog built in the wordpress platform that you adhere to a couple of general housekeeping tasks on regular basis.

Plugins/updates – always ensure that all plugins and updates are the most recent and have been checked prior to going on the site.  Do not leave a vulnerable point of entry to the site this way.

Passwords – make sure you are using a very safe password system with a combination of letters and numbers that doesn’t leave you open to being targeted by packet sniffers or just a random attack using attempts at guessing well known passwords.  For example, the use a user called admin and password of password.

If in doubt always check the wordpress forums, subscribe to their twitter or rss feed and keep up to date.

Worst case scenario is all your hard work down the drain due to a malicious hack.

If I say it once, i say it twice, if not three times a month.

Duplicate content is a big no in the world of SEO, so just think before you decide to copy content from somewhere else.  You may think that it is an easy thing to do at the time, but when Google catches you, the penalties for your site could range from a mild filter through to a full site penalty.

Surely the last thing you want to see is years of hard work down the pan, just for the sake of spending time writing your own content.  I am not saying that it is the easiest task in the world to fill your site with lots of unique, relevant content, but look for novel ways of doing rather than attempting to ‘cheat’ the system.

Always stop and think before you contemplate duplicating !!

Your blog/site starts to get a bit of traffic and a few regular readers, so the opportunity will come along to accept or provide links for your site.  The idea behind links can be two-fold.

Firstly you are looking to obtain links that will pass ‘link juice’ to the site and strengthen the PR of the site, thus helping to stabilize and improve rankings within SERPs.

Secondly you are looking to gain links that may attract visits, so you may find relevant sites that are within same industry/sector, where people interested in your topic may decide to visit your site.

The most important thing to remember when linking is to make sure you get a nice varied portfolio of links, remember natural link building is the way forward.

so you have started your site and you keep hearing the term ‘keyword density’, and you feel you should really know what it means.

Well its quite straightforward really, as it relates to the amount of times that your keywords for the site appear in sections of the site.  You will normally be optimising anything up to 7 keywords on each page and it is important that the distribution of these keywords looks as natural as possible, whilst also engaging the reader, so that the text is readable.

Ideally you want the keyword density for the body of text on the page to be anything between 2.5 and 5% of total text.  Anything over this could be determined as spammy by a search engine and could lead to a negative view on the site.

Think clever, not spam !!!