I am writing this Hub to help you choose the right consultant for your Social Media Optimization, SEO, and PPC management needs. Please continue reading more about these subjects after reading this Hub. Education is the key to hiring the right consultant for your company and for your budget.

Firstly, I am going to talk about Social Media Optimization and SEO. In order to maximize your results for Social Media Optimization, you need to have a good foundation of SEO. You should go learn about SEO first before hiring a consultant, like myself to do this stuff for you. SMO leverages the traffic from these social sites to get you more traffic. It even helps your SEO efforts by sending links back to your website with the correct anchor text. Anyone you hire to do SMO for you should be trying to get you noticed in these sites (you can visit us at www.riseuprankings.com), and even trying to rank your page on these sites, near the first page of Google. You have to be careful of such guarantees however because even Google says not to trust anyone that guarantees you a first page ranking for anything.

Social Media Optimization combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others. The SMM goals will be different for every business or organization, however most will involve some form of viral marketing to build idea or brand awareness, increase visibility, and possibly sell a product or service. SMM may also include online reputation management.

I will sum it up like this: don't believe companies that say they will sell you this magic bullet for $500 that will get you ranked #1 for all these keywords they promise. There is no such magic bullet. Your Google search you performed to find this company that has this magic bullet is not something that others can not duplicate. Meaning, if this magic bullet was true, everyone would be doing it, duh. All I would have to do is the same Goole search you did, and find one of these jokers and get my magic bullet for $500. There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO or SMO. You will end up wasting money, and have to purchase the real deal anyways in order to compete with your competition.

When hiring a consultant to do Social Media Optimization for you, make sure they do the following things:

Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is a nway to attract visitors to your website through marketing your website in popular social networking websites like Digg, & Del.icio.us.

Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks.

Article submission & Press Releases: Creation of Articles on general topics related to your site & submitting to various sites like Ezinearticles.com etc that accept help you to get one way links from content & helps to get some traffic form it too.

RSS Feeds: RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are an excellent way to keep the content on your site fresh!

Videos - This is a great way to leverage the traffic and search engine friendliness of sites like Youtube. Did you know that Youtube had twice as many page views as Google last year?

Blogs: Blogs and blog posts are already search engine friendly because they are text-rich, link-rich, frequently-updated web pages have little extraneous HTML. Blogs will help you in building link popularity and improving rankings in search engines.

I'm not going to talk much about Pay-Per-Click, other than it is great to have in your marketing strategy. When researching vendors, make sure you get info on things like, keyword research, competitors analysis, A-B testing, bidding strategy, Ad copy, strategy for jockeying for positioning, and match type. Another thing to note, is that you will most likely lose money at the beginning of your PPC campaign. This is normal. You will be doing this to find out what works best, and to try to drive down your price-per-click by bidding higher at the beginning.

I hope this Hub sets you on the right track of trying to evaluate possible vendors for these servcies. Don't hesitate to check us out at, www.riseuprankings.com. We might be a good fit for you!