Another week has rolled by, and, as always, many bloggers shared some great information with us. Here are some of the blog posts I found most useful during the past week.

• 5 Facebook Marketing Resources You Didn’t Know About — by Joanna Lord at SEOMOZ. Actually, I knew about three of these, so I felt special when I read her post. Facebook provides a lot of great information for marketers, and Joanna points out some of their tools.
• The 7 Most Important SEO Factors for Bloggers — by John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing. Duct Tape Marketing consistently offers great content, and this piece is no exception. SEO doesn’t need to be scary, and John does a great job of explaining some simple ways to help your content get found online. Bonus: John’s post featured a pic from one of my favorite photographers – Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs.
• 8 Small Business Product Landing Pages Critiqued for Conversion — by James Gardner at UnBounce. I was glad to see a good post on landing pages, since that has been our focus here lately.
• Make the Web Faster with mod_pagespeed, Now out of Beta – by Google Webmaster Central. Yeah, I know, this one is a bit geeky, but the first sentence says “Speed Matters,” and it is one of the criteria Google uses in its top secret algorithm to rank pages. It’s a good idea to keep up with trends, so that’s why I put this piece in the mix.
• A Simple Guide to Reddit for Marketers — by Danny Brown. Reddit? Seriously? With all the Twitter/Facebook hoopla in marketing, we can’t forget about all the other great social media marketing tools out there.  Even the president of the United States recently put Reddit in the spotlight by using the platform to answer policy questions. In this post, Danny shares a great infographic titled, “The Reddit Marketing Field Guide.” I think you’ll find it useful.

It’s “Wednesday is Friends Day,” and if you’re new here, we typically talk about networking online on Wednesdays through either guest blogging (and we even sometimes host guest bloggers), social media, or connecting via offline events. Today we’re going to talk about social clout. Or should I say, Klout?

You may or may not be aware of some of the changes Google has made recently in regards to how web pages are ranked, but one thing search engines are considering more and more is a site’s social media presence. In addition to creating great content and optimizing pages and developing backlinks and all the other things we do to help our pages rank well, it’s now important to boost your web presence through social media to keep that red carpet rolled out for your site.

One way to measure your social media presence is through the website Klout. It’s pretty easy to join and connect to your various social media profiles. Once you do that, Klout gives you a “Klout Score,” which you can share with your friends and compete to increase it. The Klout Score can vary from day to day and even hour to hour. The point is to keep your social media presence active.

Not only will that help your Klout Score (which is probably not extremely important), but it will increase your social media measurement by search engines (very important) and most important of all, keeping active with social media will increase your engagement with your audience.

If you’re new to social media, first go where your audience is. Is your market active on Twitter? Connecting on LinkedIn? How about Google+? Almost everyone is on Facebook these days. And, like I mentioned a couple of days ago, even MySpace is making a comeback.

Find your target market and hang out where they are. Interact with them. Stay active by providing useful content on your blog and pointing your friends and followers to your blog from your social media profiles. Continue to do this and not only will your Klout Score increase, so will traffic to your website.

Photo-sharing is a great tactic to add to your online marketing strategy. Flickr is a popular photo-sharing community where you can showcase your products and services. Here are 24 tips to help you get started:

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A couple of weeks ago, I listed 23 types of social media sites and mentioned that StumbleUpon defied definition. It’s not your typical social bookmarking site. StumbleUpon is a unique site that is part social-networking community and part personalized recommendation engine and allows users to “channel surf” the web. “Stumblers” set preferences to discover online content, and then give returned sites a thumbs up or thumbs down, which tightens one’s personal search parameters.

The more you stumble and vote, the more attuned to your likes and dislikes StumbleUpon will become. And the same goes for your target audience. This means that StumbleUpon actually delivers niche-targeted traffic to your site. And, that traffic isn’t just niche-targeted, these visitors are actively seeking certain content topics. Pretty cool.

Besides being a great place to discover great content and market your own stuff, StumbleUpon is fun. Here’s how it works:

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It’s easier to navigate the maze of online social media sites if you understand the different site categories and the purpose of each type. The social media world consists of two segments: social and media. To optimize your experience with each type of social media, it’s best to participate in the communities you choose to join.

Today’s post supplies a list of 23 types of social media, including a brief explanation of the purpose and at least one example of each type. This list will help you determine which types of social media sites would best benefit your situation. Nearly all social media sites offer free memberships.

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