Author: Courtney Mills

No doubt your website is going great guns in the search engines, but did you know you're missing out on a valuable source of traffic?

It's time to go social! The new way for online users to find websites like yours is through content linked to or posted on social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook. The key for your website is to make this linking or posting as easy as possible.

So is your site "social media friendly"? Making your site more "social media friendly" will give it a greater chance of being discovered by new searchers.

Lee Odden from Online Marketing Blog has shared a few tips :

• Fresh content - To play the search and social media game, a web site must be in the content publishing business. Search engines and participants of the social web respond favorably to the signals created from frequent updates. Participation in off site social channels can be brought into the corporate web site through RSS or widgets providing web site visitors access to additional forms of information and interaction with the company.

• Social content - Not all of a company's social web participation needs to happen offsite with third party tools. The addition of a blog, reviews, forum or even a social network to the company web site can provide intersted consumers opportunities to interact with other brand fans as well as the company.

• Easy to share - Besides the ability to contribute to conversations happening on a corporate web site, there's a tremendous opportunity and benefit to making it easy for site visitors to share that content with others. Many sites offer "share this" options that make it easy for readers to submit the page being viewed to popular social bookmarking and social news web sites such as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon. Sharing options for Facebook, Twitter and email are also popular. Making it easy for web site visitors to share interesting content (web pages, video, images) facilitates the word of mouth recommendations people make in real life, except when done online, they become searchable assets.

We have been actively making our website and blog "social media friendly" for a while now. An example of this is our blog, which has a feature allowing readers to share the article with a number of sites.

You can also find us tweeting on Twitter @ineedhits - feel free to follow us.

So if you're ready to "get social" then I would definitely suggest taking Lee's tips into consideration. Have you got any more tips to share? Feel free to share them below.

About the Author:
Courtney is an online marketing specialist at ineedhits - a leading search engine marketing firm with over 11 years experience. Courtney has been living and breathing marketing for over 2 years and specializes in web and permission email marketing and providing news and opinion to online marketing communities.

This article comes from Invision-Graphics
http://www.invision-graphics.com
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http://www.invision-graphics.com/article546-is-your-site-social-media-friendly.html