clipped from www.forrester.com

Blogs help with search rankings in several ways: Comments on blogs provide more content to index; frequent updates mean that the search engine's Web crawlers come more often; and inbound links from other blogs and sites mean higher relevancy scores in algorithms.

Services like FeedBurners' FeedFlare and Bazaarvoice's ShareThis automatically insert links into blog posts, content pages, and product pages, making it simple to tag or share on sites like Facebook, Digg, and del.icio.us.

Investments in MySpace.com and Facebook will reach not only a quarter of the online youth population, but also support natural word of mouth and email, which are top sources of site referrals for youth. The key is tracking where traffic originates — for example, from a note posted on Facebook — as well as the channel, be it from a blog, email, or word of mouth. Use services from providers like Hitwise and Compete to map traffic patterns of your target customers.