Optimizing your social presence for search is important, right? That is certainly what we've all been told for some time, but determining why it's important and deciding where to focus can be challenging. Exponential growth of a medium is great and all, but your problems figuring out how to tame the wild beast tend to grow exponentially as well. 

Let's discuss a couple of simple ideas regarding conversational media (i.e., social networking sites and blogs) and its relation to search:

1. How to help your social pages rank better
2. How to help your website rank better with social influences

A Little Perspective About the Market as a Whole

The growth in activity at conversational media sites is undeniable. The number of unique has increased more than 80 percent since 2007 to 213 million in May 2011, while total visits to the category grew 136 percent to 6.2 billion. 

Since a search click to a website represents one type of site visit, this is where we can begin to connect the dots on influence between navigation events. The number of search clicks to the category reached 845 million in May, accounting for 13.5 percent of the total visits to the category. That number has grown 145 percent since 2007, outpacing gains in both unique visitors and total category visits.

Read the full article here ... http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2081719/Social-SEO-Facebook-Twitter-Best-Practices