Lynn Clare asked, "Can you talk a little bit about the benefits of using social networks to accomplish SEO?" and Cori Peters asked, "How does creating a social "private" network affect SEO"

For people unfamiliar with SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of techniques that enable a website to appear higher in a list of search engine results. Put simply, how to be a top result on Google.

Take for example the search phrase, "Hawaii Hotel". On Google, that search returns a page within the TripAdvisor website before any actual hotel sites. You have to ask yourself why that is.

Google is in the game of providing relevant search results. It ranks highly sites that contain current information and appear unbiased. A site that reviews hotels is much more useful than the single website of a single hotel chain. Applying SEO techniques take time and experience. It's a long term investment that requires careful analysis and execution. It typically involves a lot of content development if you're the only writer for your website.

Done properly, however, social networks can greatly benefit an organization's presence on web search engines by virtue of those networks being ever-changing and by being filled with unbiased user-generated content.

To be included in web searches, however, some of the content on your social network must be public. If a search engine cannot "crawl" or copy what's on your network, it can't offer your pages as search results. A social network that hopes to rank high must therefore promote public profiles and public content (this is typically at the discretion of  your members). There might be a tendency to set defaults privacy settings to "private" but this really works against you. It hurts both SEO and the general network effect you might be hoping to achieve with your social network.

As an example, Ramius' own consumer social network Sixent.com already ranks very high on Google. Ramius does not write any content or invest any time on SEO activities but the social networking software is itself optimized. If you search for the name of someone that is profiled on Sixent, their profile often ranks higher than other sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Here's a search of my name on Google - the first result is my Sixent profile.