I was going to write this, but it was done so well by Kat French over at Social Media Explorer, that I'll just send you over there.  A taste.

SEOs complain that bloggers, social news power users and other social media types are pimping the system in their own way, and are often woefully uninformed about the basics of how search engines index and rank sites.

On the other hand, I also see a lot of cross-pollination of ideas among the top players on both sides.

The fact is, search and social are, if you’ll pardon the pun, intrinsically linked. As long as Google dominates search (which all evidence points to being for the foreseeable future), developing quality inbound links will be invaluable in search engine optimization.

Two of the stories I use in describing the technical aspects of social media are the JC Penney and The Post Dispatch.  Both companies used blogposting software to publish content, and in doing so, greatly enhanced their search engine profiles.

As a small company, you can achieve this effect with your newsfeed.  Many of you have a news section of your website. It's currently powered either by hand (your developer uploads the content), or you have a CMS that allows you to do so.  Here's the social media technical solution.

Create a blog account in Wordpress, Typepad or blogger.  Use typepad if you have no subdomains, blogger.com if you don't understand html very well, and Wordpress if you have a php developer who can integrate a blog into your website.

Typepad Example:

news.yourcompany.com - map the domain to the subdomain using Typepad's middle level account, customize the blog to have the same colors as your site, and add a banner of your company logo.  The resulting blog will look something like this.  This is an excellent solution, but it has one drawback.  You have to update it regularly, but that is already a concern.

Using the blog template, everything you write is not SEO friendly, and oh by the way has an RSS feed automatically generated.  The example above is no longer updated, but you can see the results anyway. Using CheckPageRank.net or your PR toolbar, check the pageranks of the main site versus that of the blog.  With no activity in over a year, the newssection blog is a PR3, while the site is still a PR 0.  If active - the blog would be a PR 4 or 5 (in fact it used to be).  More important, the blog would be indexed in Google for searches related to your company name, something your current newsfeed cannot do.

One of the keys to success in marketing is taking experiences from other industries and applying them to your clients.  In the last two years, my success in internet marketing, specifically in social media, can be shown in many ways to stem from my time as a recruiter.

Recruiters build relationships to gather information about the market, namely to generate referrals and job orders.  It's a data-heavy experience that depends on the ability to draw information from your network.  Learning to filter important data and make quick decisions from e-mail and searches is a valuable skill for recruiters, but I've found it to be important in using social networks to promote client sites.

Of course, finding information is only half the battle.  Candidates want to know where you found them, and so if you're going to delve into this area, make sure you know how to speak to the people inside the social network.  I want to showcase a friend of mine whose company helps sourcers build those lists from internet sources.  Broadlook is a pretty cool company with powerful software for recruiters, but the president has a deft touch in social media.  Watch as he pulls 4,000 names from a recruiting social network, and then to show that he can be trusted, deletes them. 

It's a good lesson on building a reputation, but it's also a lesson to marketers about the possibilities in social networks.  A first page google or Technorati search isn't enough anymore, and most marketers lack the tools or the training to dig deeply into a community.  With Broadlook, I'm able to apply my training and their software to bring recruiting knowhow into social media marketing.