You may be focused on gaining traffic via keywords and linkfarms that you might have overlooked social media. You see, people, search engine optimization is not just about building traffic through keywords. There's also social media to take care of.
Social media, of course involves listening to your customers, figuring out what they want, and creating content that engages your target market according to what you've learned from them. Not one part is more important than the other.
How to listen to your customers
Any SEO effort is a huge undertaking that entails a lot of time and energy. We don't want to make a huge campaign running in blind - that would be the height of stupidity, wouldn't it? This is why you need to listen. You need to find out what social destinations your customers frequent - be it Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, or whatever. This is how you'll get a better understanding of how your customer goes about the time they go online: are they into videos or do they just stay in forums? What are they keywords they use? Do they have any opinion leaders in their social networks?
That knowledge can help you focus your social SEO campaign better: now you know which social media to target, what keywords to use and if you can target certain opinion leaders to do the hard work for you.
Create Content
Let's face it: content is the biggest factor in any SEO campaign. We all need to create constant content to engage the customers and to keep them interested even after a long time. And I'm not just talking about the text you see on websites. Let's be imaginative. Content can be web pages, images, video, audio, rich media and file types such as HTML, PDF, MS Office docs, Structured Data Feeds and RSS. Anything that can be promoted via the social channels your consumers frequent is content. Valuable,, valuable content.
Fill the content with keywords - the ones you managed to find out during your time researching your market - and deploy it on the said social channels. Let people know your content is there by pimping the hell out of it.
You must also remember that content may be king, but without interaction it will be just that. Don't underestimate the power of interacting with your consumers on their social media channels of choice. Spend 10-30 minutes every day commenting, friending, following, liking and updating. Make people interact with your brand so much that there's just no way to not grow awareness. You'll be getting more subscribers, fans, friends, followers and links. And of course, whenever you get to have people talking about you on social networks and producing links to your site, your referral traffic increases. And it goes without saying, more links, more keywords, and stronger referral traffic means a better chance of ranking in search engines.
That is how Social Media can help you with your search engine optimisation. Good luck with your own Social SEO campaign!