1. Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
2. Twitter now has 75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
3. LinkedIn has over 50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
4. Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
5. Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about.
   More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
6. Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
8. Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last year at this time.
9. Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
10. There are more than 3.5bn pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
11. Towards the end of last year, the average number of tweets per day was over 27.3 million.
    
12. The average number of tweets per hour was around 1.3m.
    
13. More than 700,000 local businesses have active Pages on Facebook.
14. Purpose-built Facebook pages have created more than 5.3bn fans.
15. 15% of bloggers spend 10 or more hours each week blogging, according to Technorati’s new State of the Blogosphere.
16. At the current rate, Twitter will process almost 10bn tweets in a single year.
17. More than 250 Facebook applications have over a million combined users each month.
18. 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blog.
19. 38% of bloggers post brand or product reviews.
20. More than 80,000 websites have implemented Facebook Connect since December 2008 and more than 60m Facebook users engage with it across these external sites each month.

Impressive stuff, but as always, take these stats with a pinch of salt. As before, no single piece of information can be used to base an online strategy upon, or be used as a forecast as to the direction a specific social media channel may take in the future – you need to fully understand your marketing and business objectives before launching off into this apparently vast space. Thanks to econsultancy business, these stats can be tracked and used for your good.

The Competition Is Fierce

These days, it’s almost the exact opposite. Even keyword phrases that nobody’s searching for can sometimes be difficult to obtain high rankings with unless you really and truly know what you’re doing. And even then, those rankings may be here one day and gone the next. The problem is magnified for new businesses and new websites. If your site isn’t at least a few years old, your SEO efforts will be less likely to provide the results you want. This is one reason why your website optimization should always be seen as a long-term proposition.

It’s About Targeted Traffic, Not Rankings

As we move forward in this industry, webmasters, site owners, and SEOs need to shift their focus from asking how they can get this keyword to this position in this engine to how they can get more targeted traffic and convert it into customers. Unfortunately, a large portion of those looking into SEO services are still seeing the small picture. For instance, on the contact form on our High Rankings site, I ask people to tell me a little bit about their “business goals.” A good number who fill it out want something like “top-5 rankings in Google and Yahoo for this keyword.” Huh? That’s not a business goal! A business goal is more like “Bring more people to my website who are searching online for the types of products we sell.” (As a side note, soon after writing this, I got an email from someone whose goal was to have their Flash site be “#1 in all the search engines for the word ’spring.’” I kid you not!)

Don’t get me wrong, I very much understand why people would love to move their rankings up from #11 to #1 for a highly sought-after and targeted keyword phrase. I’m quite sure it would very much increase their targeted traffic and their sales (assuming they’re doing everything else right). My frustration lies in the fact that there are people who believe that somehow an SEO company can magically snap their fingers or wave their magic wand and make it so.

Even the best SEOs are not magicians. They can’t simply place a site at the top of the engines when there are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of others that offer basically the same thing, and provide basically the same information. If they could, you’d see a whole lot more millionaire SEOs.

Does this mean that SEO is dead?

Absolutely not! But SEO that focuses on rankings for the most highly sought-after keywords in any given space is most definitely dying. This doesn’t mean that you have to settle for keywords that receive few searches. It just means that you have to broaden your horizons and see the big picture.

Almost every time I review one of those “put me at #1″ prospects’ websites, I see tons of opportunities for fixing the site in general so that it will work better for both their users and the search engines. They are almost always so focused on their “money phrases” that they completely neglect many areas of their site. Instead they put their special phrase on every page and never research the thousands of others that are being typed into search engines every day.

Content for Content’s Sake

Another trend I’ve been seeing a lot lately is the creation of content simply for the sake of creating content. What’s that all about? SEOs certainly throw the words “good content” around a lot, but why is it that nobody seems to know what that means? We now have a whole cottage industry of companies who will allegedly write “good content” for you. Worse, there are even some that will *rent* you content! Newsflash…good content has nothing to do with the history of your products. Nor is good content a bunch of madlib spam pages where you simply substitute keyword phrases from one page into the other. Good content isn’t stuff you write for the search engines.

What Exactly Is Good Content?

Good content is unique. Really and truly unique. It is creative ideas that simply popped into your head which nobody else in your space has thought of yet. The key to good content is creativity. Unfortunately, creativity itself seems to be a dying art. Being creative isn’t looking at what your competitor is doing and copying them. It’s being a leader, not a follower. It’s having your own voice and your own opinions and expressing them, regardless of what others might think. It’s pouring your heart and soul into your website, not looking for the next quick fix. And it’s (say it with me) making your site the best it can be for your site visitors AND the search engines. It’s what brings targeted traffic to our own site for thousands of phrases, and it’s what will help your site gain traffic for whatever phrases relate to it. But it’s not easy, and it’s not fast. And it can’t be done with the flick of a switch.

Written by Jill Whalens on highrankings.com

1. Brand your Company – One of the great benefits to the exposure that you can get through social media is the result it has on the branding of your company. Branding is key to building a success in social media in the long-term, and social media is an excellent option for helping visitors to see your company in a particular light
2. Get Quick Results – Building a successful website takes a considerable amount of time and effort. Search engine rankings, for instance, can take years to build in a competitive niche. On the other hand, with social media you can develop content and be seen by thousands of visitors within the same day. For this reason, social media is a great option for getting a new website or blog noticed right away.
3. Social Media is Flexible -There are so many different social media websites that just about every imaginable niche is covered in one way or another. There are social news sites, bookmarking sites, and general networking sites. Whatever your needs and your audience, there should be an option to use social media for your benefit. Also, you’re not stuck to using the same social media sites over and over. If you’re not getting results in one place there’s usually other options that you can try out. Just make sure someone is monitoring the content.
4. It Will Lead to Increase in Traffic – Although visitors from social media sites may be less responsive than other types of visitors, success with social media will likely increase the number of inbound links you receive. Links will boost your organic search engine rankings and they’ll also drive click-through traffic your way. Both are generally high quality traffic sources.
5. Social Media Users are Predictable -The whole concept of Digg or Rating Systems wouldn’t even be possible if social media users were unpredictable. But the truth is you can usually have a good idea of what is likely to draw a response and what is not by tracking their online intelligence. With the correct Consumer Intelligence Engines in place, this will come with time, and of course the results will be much more powerful as you’re responding to your customers needs – NOT what you think they are. However, once you know a social media audience pretty well, you can cater content to their preferences with a pretty high success rate.
6. Building Links with Social Media is Safer than Buying Links – If you plan to cut out the need for social media by purchasing links from other sites, you’re running the risk of being penalized or banned by Google. For some, this is a risk worth taking, but in most cases I would strongly discourage taking this chance. Personally, I focus on building links for my primary blog through the combination of content and social media and linking them naturally.
7. Links Can Help Your Search Engine Rankings -Earlier I mentioned to social media can provide instant results. Well, in addition to sending loads of traffic directly, the links that result from social media success can get your new posts ranking very well with search engines almost immediately. It’s not uncommon for me to see a very respectable number of visitors from Google searches to a brand new post that just drew a lot of links through social media. While it will take a while to build search engine rankings as a whole, it is possible to create specific posts to rank well right away.
8. It Allows You to Leverage Your Existing Traffic -Do you already have a solid blog with a steady flow of traffic? If so, chances are you could leverage that traffic to draw even more visitors with social media. You may want to use voting buttons on your posts or ask some of your readers and friends to give you a vote occasionally.
9. Some Visitors Will Be Targeted -The biggest knock on social media traffic is that it’s not targeted, and that is typically true. However, visitors from niche social media sites can be very highly targeted, and on top of that, a portion of visitors from general news sites will be targeted as well. For example, if you get 25,000 visitors from a post on the Digg front page, maybe only 5,000 of them will have much of an interest in your site. Still, that’s a quick 5,000 visitors that you wouldn’t have had without social media. Just because a smaller percentage of the visitors will stick doesn’t mean that they are irrelevant.
10. The Future of the Internet is Social – Social media and social networking aren’t going away any time soon. The major players and the types of social sites may change of the course of time, but this is a trend that online marketers need to adjust to. Without finding ways to build a website or blog through social media you could be left behind by your competitors.