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Hi  Mubashir, I would suggest you begin by focusing on the on-page SEO first. I'm not sure what level you're at in terms of your SEO knowledge but for a re-cap, the SEOMoz beginners guide to SEO is always great - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo Once you have the structure, content and on-page optimization correct, you can then consider who your audience is, where they can be found online and appropriate methods for putting your site in front of the right people. With this in mind, you can then begin to build relationships with the influential people who will allow you to put your site in front of their audience.

Your Belgian page is probably less strong than the other ones you own.  On the page itself try increasing fans + engagement.  Off page - increase the links going towards the Facebook page from your website and other external websites.

Any feedback from HuffPost on that?

Likes can impact search results in Bing. But beyond that, they're social proof more than anything else. Likes to your page, however, can be used as a way to connect with your fans over Facebook, and will likely have benefits for Facebook's new Graph Search as well. I would choose building up my Facebook following over having people like my homepage.

Many Thanks Paul I have set up a new account for the old username to catch/divert anyone using old username Cheers Dan

Thanks Jason for your kind reply. You are basically saying that we are not worse off - the decline is a mere adjustment to "reality" again. We have at least increased our potential awareness factor.

Social signals are not strong ranking factors, at least not yet.  The only social network that has direct impact on rankings is Google+.  Twitter activity has been correlated with rankings, but the results are debatable (although Twitter is great for getting new content indexed). It is impossible to get followed backlinks from Instagram, so it has no direct impact for SEO per se.  However, it can still be a great way to build up your brand, build an audience, and gain free organic traffic.

SEO sites that make it seem like the lift is anywhere from 20-40% I don't think that it did anything for my CTR. I don't think that it did anything for my rankings either.

If you can contact the person directly, consider them a lukewarm lead. It's not like they filled out a lead gen form or otherwise told you they're interested in your product/service, but they're not exactly cold either. That being said, it is entirely possible that them looking at your profile was not motivated by any thoughts of purchase, so you don't want to go in too strong. If I were you, I'd email them or send them an LI message and just say that you know that you're part of the same LI group, or that you're in the same field, or something like that and that you just want to say hi and learn about their business... or something to that effect. If they're not interested, they'll say no or not even reply. If they're interested, you've opened the door to inform them about what you do through asking them what they do

I'd supply clients with a glossary so that they have a point of reference. I'd also stick with your own terminology and explanation, I think it's important otherwise you will end up having one word that is used differently across multiple clients. What you have written explains the three just fine. If you wanted to, in the directory explanation you could expand it and say that there are primary, secondary and niche directories with different levels of benefits.

I'm actually not entirely sure how much access Google has to this kind of information. Over the last few years my opinion is there's been ongoing debate about exactly what Google can see in terms of Facebook data but it's clear that Facebook (social) signals do seem to have a correlation to rankings. Just to clarify, people can't "like" a website (well, they can like the home page, but that's just the home PAGE, not the web SITE), so you have can have a "like" button on every page of your website. You can also encourage people to like your facebook page. And as a side, "like" and "recommend" are the same thing. "Share" takes a little more effort from the user and I don't think many people use "share" any more, not too sure. But why not have both buttons? - a like button on all key pages of your website and also encourage people to like your facebook page. Someone liking your web page means it'll appear in their news feed, their friends will see it, and then that's it. Liking a facebook page means you have that person seeing all activity on your facebook page. I know you're asking about SEO / Google / Social Signals but I thought it was worth clarifying the above as I'm sure while you want better rankings, you also want more traffic to both your site and your facebook page. You can associate your website with your facebook page and using Open Graph, post updates to that page and they'll appear on the feeds of anyone who has liked your facebook page. As for which is better? I'd like to see if someone actually has an answer to that. I haven't been able to find specific information on exactly what Google sees, what it indexes, and what social signals it takes into account. Adam

Yes I would have 3 different personal and company accounts, but be careful how you interact with them, I am not in the US or a lawyer but my understanding is that you are not allowed to pose as a member of the public and promote a product while you are really the company, I think it is an FCC rule?, does that make sense? The technique I have always used is a useful employee, you do not hide the fact you work for the company (mention it in your profile) but you act as though you are just so in love with the topic that you want to help everyone with everything. Thanks for the thumbs up Sean

You could also try Viral Heat or Sprout Social.

Proper link shorteners like Ow.ly use 301 redirects to point to the final link destination, so Google counts them pretty much the same as a regular unshortened link. The benefits of a shortened link in Twitter to allow you to include other info in the 140 characters makes them pretty much essential. One other benefit of shortened links is you can include Analytics tracking parameters in them if you're linking back to your own site. That way you can accurately track where your own website traffic is coming from. (Hootsuite Pro lets you set this up to occur automatically.) Even if you're linking to other sites, the click analytics built into the link shorteners can give you some useful info on how many times your links were clicked. So short answer - shortened links don't have an real problems from an SEO perspective and the extra analytics they allow can be very useful.

Those were very helpful. Thanks! Tom

Well each of those sites links to your twitter as well so its a nice two-for-one. But add you twitter link to author bylines (guest blog posts). Whenever you are mentioned online, ask for a link to your twitter (think interviews). When you say "link to twitter account... from somewhere specific", I think twitter directories.

How do you feel about guest bloggin?  Our site has a blog but all blog entries are written by me.  It can be difficult to find something new to write about ont he same topic everyday.  Also it takes an hour or two to write worthy content.  Just spewing something out to get new content is not worth it.  I want to allow guest blogging.  This will create more time for me to focus onother SEO tasks and broader blog topics.  The carrot for guest blogging would be a link to the guest bloggers site. However, it is believed by the powers that be at the company that we never want any outbound links.  Once we have them on our site we want them to stay here.