I've presented a great deal of information in my series on Leveraging Social Media for SEO (click at left to see all posts in this series).  It may be a bit overwhelming to know how to get started and where to focus your efforts first, so let me give you some pointers.

First of all, as with all marketing efforts, the ideal approach is to do research and develop a social media strategy that considers your corporate goals and target audience before doing anything else.  If you can actually do this, good for you!  But if your company, like mine, is moving too fast to do this, I suggest you just go ahead and dive in!

Set up profiles - play with the social media sites, learn, adjust, tweak, and chip away at it.  This doesn't mean you should do anything stupid or inappropriate, of course (you may want to revisit my post on What Not To Do), but I know too many people get "analysis paralysis" and there's a real danger in not doing anything.  Better to start out rudimentarily, learn, and enhance as you go than to fail to start at all.

With that, I've divided the tactics in this series into four categories, roughly in order of priority (assuming that we all have limited time and want to focus first on where we can get the most bang for the proverbial buck).  These categories are based on my opinion, so your mileage may vary.  Also, keep in mind that they're in priority by results in terms of search engine optimization only.  As I've stated before, there are endless other reasons to engage in social media besides SEO, so strategic considerations may mean it makes sense for you to reorder my list.

Fast Tactics That Provide Direct Results

- LinkedIn Profiles (personal and business)

Throughout my series on Leveraging Social Media for SEO (click at left to see all posts in this series), I've talked about the opportunity to put keywords, or search terms, into the text of links pointing to your corporate website.  (This link text is officially known as "anchor text".)  This helps tell the search engines what the page you're linking to is about, which can help it rank higher for that search term.  For example, if your company is the Acme Company that sells purple widgets, you could put a link pointing to your site in your corporate Flickr account or a Squidoo lens.  You've got options for what you put in your anchor text, such as:

We've been optimizing press releases since before "social media" was a widely-used term.  Optimized press releases (described below) are great for getting a release found in regular search engine results as well as news search engine results (Google News, Yahoo News, etc.).  Taking a press release to the next level and using newer social media tagging and distribution options will get it found on social media sites as well, leading to even more viewership.

Let's get one thing straight first, though - we are not talking about traditional public relations here.  When a public relations professional writes a press release, their target audience is an editor or journalist at a media outlet (newspaper, magazine, TV news station, etc.).  They hand-select the journalists to target and try to build a relationship with them.  They only send truly newsworthy releases, with the goal of reaching the target audience indirectly (through the third party media).  It's a very "rifleshot" (narrowly targeted) approach, and it works very well for getting editorial coverage.

Optimizing press releases, leveraging their social media aspects and distributing them across the Internet is, instead, a "shotgun" (broad) approach.  We're not trying to reach journalists here (if we happen to, that's gravy).  We're bypassing traditional media and trying to get the press release seen directly by our target audience on search engines, social media sites, and other websites.  We write the release for our prospective customers, but still should only send newsworthy releases.

Here's how to optimize a press release, in a nutshell:

- Include one or two targeted search terms in the press release's headline, subhead/summary, and body copy (ideally in the first paragraph, as well as other places).  This will help the release show up in news search engines for the first 30 days after release (they're purged from the news databases after that since they're not considered "news" any more).  Releases also often show up in the main search engine results and can be a great way to take up more real estate there, in addition to the company's website listing.

- Include a link pointing back to the company's website with search terms in the text of the link (anchor text).  This can help that web page rank higher for that search term (be sure the search term used in the anchor text is the same term for which the linked page is optimized).

- Use PR Web to distribute the release, paying $200 to tailor the anchor text as described above.  There are other online distribution services and newswires, but we've found PR Web to be the best for optimization and social media purposes.

Here's how to leverage social media options on PR Web:

- Upload photos and logos/graphics, if appropriate for that particular release.

- Put search terms in the Technorati tags to help the release get found in that social media search engine.

- Allow the company's website to be embedded into the bottom of the press release so interested readers can easily visit.

- Take advantage of the "Blog This" and "Share This" buttons, as well as the bookmark links (such as to Delicious) at the bottom of the page.

- PR Web also attaches podcasts to press releases if appropriate (this isn't something our clients have wanted to try yet).

Not only will this get the press release found on more websites, allowing your brand to take up more room in the search engine results and linking back to the company site, but it'll increase awareness of your business and drive direct traffic to the site as well.

There are a number of websites that allow anyone to create a page on them, on just about any topic.  This is another great way to create optimized content that can appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs).  You can also build links into the content, pointing to your main website, which may help boost that site's rankings.

Here are the three most well-known content sites:

Squidoo
Squidoo calls web pages "lenses" (because they're supposed to be focused on one topic - get it?).  Squidoo encourages commercial lenses, so you can add one about your business as a whole, and/or you can repurpose articles and other content for their site.  Bottom line:

- Lenses appear in SERPs.

- You can include links, in which you can change the text of the link (anchor text) to include search terms.

- These links do pass link juice!

- In addition to lenses you've created, the above also applies to your "lensmaster" profile page.

Google Knol
A "knol" is a unit of knowledge, according to Google.  Bottom line:

- Knols appear in SERPs.

- You can include search terms in anchor text.

- Google has said that these links do not pass link juice...except for some particularly "trustworthy" knols (whatever that means).  Still, it can't hurt to have quality content about your company hosted on a Google property.  Just keep it editorial and informational more than commercial.

HubPages
Keeping with the clever nomenclature, HubPages calls web pages "hubs."  Bottom line:

- Hubs appear in SERPs.

- You can include search terms in anchor text.

- Links pass juice if the "HubScore" is over 75.  HubScore is based on original content, amount of traffic, number of "thumbs up" votes, and the quality of the "Hubber" (author).  So the more time you spend creating quality content for HubPages, the more likely that content will pass juice to any sites you link to.

When working with content sites - or any social media, for that fact - remember to do it appropriately and add value for the community.  If your time is limited, it's worth spending some of it in Squidoo, if nowhere else.

To round out the top three most-used social bookmarking sites, we'll cover Digg today.  Like Delicious, Digg is a site where you can post bookmarks and access them from any computer.  But Digg's focus is really on news-sharing, as well as sharing videos and images.

You can submit your own news items and (optimized) press releases, and you can put search terms in the title (which becomes a link - hello, anchor text!) and description.  Submissions are listed on the Digg site in order of the number of "diggs" they get from readers (having a lot of comments helps too).  Web pages that get a lot of diggs and rank high on Digg's site can get tons of traffic, at least until they get bumped off by the next hot news item.

A few warnings about Digg...many of its users are youngish males who tend toward the technical side.  So those are the types of items that tend to rank highest.  Digg users also seem to hate search marketers.  So if you submit an overly-optimized web page or appear to be trying to "game their system," they will "bury" your submission (a bury is the opposite of a digg).

Digg does not pass along link juice, since the web pages open within a Digg frame.  So Digg has limited uses for SEO purposes unless you've got a really interesting, newsworthy item.  Otherwise, given the lack of link juice and the need for many, many diggs, this is a site you can probably put toward the bottom of your priority list.

Yesterday I covered Delicious, which is a true social bookmarking site.  While I've lumped StumbleUpon into the same category, it really works quite differently.  Users download the StumbleUpon toolbar and tell StumbleUpon what types of sites they're interested in - there are business-like categories (technology, news) and fun categories (music, arts).  Clicking on the "Stumble" button on the toolbar will serve up websites that tie in to your interests.  This can be an interesting and easy way to discover new sites on the web (and potentially waste time!).

The toolbar also has "thumbs up" and "thumbs down" buttons.  Hitting them will tell StumbleUpon to serve up more sites like the one you're on, or fewer.  Sites with lots of thumbs ups get served up more often (there's that "social media popularity" thing again!).

The key to leveraging StumbleUpon for SEO purposes is to submit your site by navigating to it and then being the first person to hit the thumbs up button on the toolbar.  After doing that, you'll be able to add a title (which becomes a link - and you can put search terms in the anchor text), reviews, and tags (more places for search terms).  You want to be the first person to "stumble" your site so you can control the title and tags!

Important benefit:  When a StumbleUpon user runs a search on Google, sites that have been stumbled will have a small, colorful StumbleUpon logo to the right of the listing.  If they have received any/many thumbs ups, they'll also get one to five gold stars listed.  This is huge -- among the drab text listings, the colorful logo and stars really draw your eye to these listings, increasing the chance that a searcher will click on them.  This alone is reason enough to submit your site to StumbleUpon, especially as the number of other users grows.

Note that StumbleUpon is mostly used by people for entertainment - at this point, business-oriented sites are not likely to receive a huge number of "stumbles".  StumbleUpon does use "nofollow" tags, so supposedly it doesn't pass along link juice.  I have my doubts - like Delicious, StumbleUpon is fast, easy and free to use, so it certainly can't hurt, as long as it's used appropriately.

Hint:  "Thumbs up" web pages that link to your site as well!  This may give them a boost, which may trickle down and help your site too.

Now that we've covered blogs, social networking profiles, microblogging, and video/photo-sharing sites, let's turn our attention to social bookmarking sites.  I'm going to cover the three most popular, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Digg.  Even though I've lumped these three sites into the same category, they actually are quite different.

Today, let's talk about Delicious, one of the first true social bookmarking sites.  It was originally launched at http://del.icio.us by someone being clever with the URL, but now it's at the much easier to remember and type www.delicious.com.  Delicious launched as a site to save your bookmarks online rather than on your hard drive through your browser's "favorites", so when you're using different computers, they're always available.

Over time, people started sharing bookmarks with other people on Delicious and using it to discover new sites from people who share their interests.  Delicious tracks how many times each web page has been bookmarked, so this is another instance where social media "popularity" may indirectly affect organic rankings.

Delicious allows its users to save as many links as they'd like, and you can control the anchor text of the link itself, which is great.  I put search terms in the anchor text, as well as the description of the web page and the tags for that bookmark.

Important: Delicious does use the "nofollow" tag on all their links, so supposedly they don't pass along any link juice.  However, I strongly suspect that some juice may be passed along, plus it can't hurt to have search terms in the anchor text of the links.  Delicious is fast, free, and easy to use, so while it may not have a tremendous impact on your organic rankings, it's still worthwhile.

Flickr and other photo-sharing sites (where the photos are not hidden behind a password) also offer opportunities to take up room in the search engine results pages and build links pointing to your site.

There are lots of places to put keywords on Flickr, including:

- Your account name
- Each photo's title
- Each photo's description
- Each photo's tags

In addition, you can put links in the description, pointing to your main site.  You can even put keywords in the anchor text of the link, which is a rare opportunity that shouldn't be missed!  Supposedly, Flickr doesn't pass link juice, but I'm not sure I buy that.  It certainly can't hurt to include a link (again, at a minimum, it should help drive traffic).

Are you thinking that sharing photos isn't appropriate for a business?  I disagree!  Again, you probably already have photos around, such as executive head shots, products, your facilities, events, etc.  Unless you've got something proprietary or confidential, it can't hurt to upload them.  Once you get your feet wet, you might even think about taking photos based on in-demand content or targeted keywords.

Did you know that if YouTube was considered a search engine, it would be the second most-used search engine in the world, after Google?  So not only can videos on YouTube help your company with general awareness and branding, but they can also help your search engine optimization efforts.

Many companies don't seem to think that videos are appropriate for them.  That said, I'll bet most of them already have some existing corporate videos, such as interviews with executives, training videos, product demonstrations, sales videos, events, etc.  Obviously, you wouldn't want to post anything proprietary, but non-confidential videos can be edited into short segments and posted on YouTube and other video-sharing sites.

Videos tend to rank highly on the search engines, especially Google.  Ironically, it can be easier and faster to get videos to rank high than a regular website (the same is often true with most social media).  So in order to "optimize" a YouTube video to take up more space in the search engine results, include targeted keywords in the video's title, description, and tags.

There's some debate about whether or not YouTube passes along link juice -- if it does, it probably doesn't count for a whole lot.  Still, it certainly can't hurt to include a link pointing to your website in the description.  Include the "http://" part of the URL to ensure that it's a live link.  If nothing else, it may drive traffic to the site.

Another tip - post your videos on your website as well and optimize those pages.  More optimized content is always a plus!

The category of "microblogging" is dominated by Twitter, so that's the site that I'm going to focus on.  Each tweet (Twitter "post" of 140 characters or less) does actually become its own unique web page.  You can see this by going to Google and typing this into the search box: site:http://twitter.com/yourname.  You'll see one web page displayed for each tweet that you've posted.