It's a good idea to think of your social profiles as websites in their own right. Being on highly trafficked and active websites with high page rank they will automatically rank reasonably well for name searches. But they will appear higher in results if you build links to them. Getting them onto page one can help your reputation, because people searching for your name will most likely see your social profiles, and not what other people have written about you (some of which may not be very complimentary, particularly if you are a political blogger!).

As well as building links to these profile pages, it's recommended that you participate often and thoughtfully in the networks themselves. This activity will also help lift your profile in the search engines. I know this from personal experience. I've seen my Linkedin and Twitter profiles rise up the rankings for searches for my name after I was active on them for a while.

To this end, commenting on blogs is also worth doing. So many blogs now have boxes to put your Twitter handle in. I assume that the majority of such links are "nofollow". But some would be "dofollow", which would help lift the site being linked to search engine wise. (In any case, some blog readers are bound to click on those links and end up following you. So it's worth doing just for that.)

I've been blogging for a long while now, and have built and maintained several blogs. Almost all of them were pretty much entirely verbal. That's because I love writing, and just never had the time to take photos in the first place, let alone add them to posts.

Anyway, I've changed this approach greatly on one of my blogs. It's a local blog about my city called The Real Perth Blog. I write many posts about different locations in the city. And where I appropriate I include my shots of them.

I've noticed a couple of things. Firstly, people come via verbal searches for photos quite often. That is, they'll arrive via queries like "Perth arena images". They'll also come via the specific image search route from time to time.

It's usually pretty easy to get to the top of image searches for those specific local landmarks. That's because while there are numerous snaps of them up on the web, very few people are naming them accurately. So if you just label the files well, you'll appear way ahead of the vast majority of them. (I know that many bloggers recommend including alt tags with your keywords in them. But it still helps a lot simply to put them into the file name.)

The other thing I've noticed from my stats is that visitors who come looking for images do like to have a look around for others on the blog. (That is, they'll click on the "photos" and "landmarks" tags.)

This is just a hunch, but I suspect this effect is particularly pronounced for local blogs like that one I have about Perth. Nothing gives the sense of what a locality is like more than photographs, after all.

In the last few months I have started some Facebook pages for various blogs. I've definitely put this off, having devoted so much time and effort to building solid followings on Twitter, and learning how to use the site. But I can see huge possibilities with Facebook.

Firstly, there's the potential of tapping into all that traffic within its "walled garden". It's like a whole universe in itself.

The other thing is that it's very easy to build content on Facebook pages. You just need to share some interesting links with some thoughtful text around them. As you find and add this content you're putting more ideas into your own head. And if you let these marinate for a while, you can come up with some great ideas for longer posts that you can add to a blog.

Speaking of blogging: Getting comments on your posts is desirable, of course. Similarly, getting people to comment on your Facebook page updates is really important. That's why it's a good idea to ask for input, just as you would on a blog. And to reply soon, too. Not only will the fans who comment be more likely to do so again, but other people will see the interactions occurring and be more likely to add their thoughts.

Also, quite a few blogs have Facebook comments installed. So if you log in as your page and comment on those blogs they will appear as page updates. Along with your comment, Facebook grabs a bit of the blog post, as well as an image if there is one. So you're building interesting content in two locations at the same time.

You should seek out other Facebook pages in your niche and participate in them as well. This is like promoting a blog with comments. If you keep at it, making relevant and thoughtful contributions, more and more fans of these pages will get to know you and have a look at your page. Some of them are sure to become its fans.

What do you think? Is it valid to see a Facebook page as being much like a blog? Or do you think the analogy is not accurate, and a different approach is needed?