By now you've probably at least heard of some of the incredibly popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, YouTube and Squidoo, just to name a few. More likely you have an account with one or two of these services, which allow you to keep in touch with friends and let interested people know what you're up to all day.

Many people simply use these sites for fun, but the savvy web entrepreneur will also use these sites in a promotional way. Here are some tips you can use to bring social networking into your website optimization strategy.

• Make stories easily linkable. If you want to see your stories on Digg or StumbleUpon, make it easy for other people to promote your articles by adding buttons to the bottom of them. This is not too difficult to do and makes it super easy for your fans to help you in your promotion efforts.
  
• Syndicate yourself. RSS feeds are very common on all sorts of websites these days; they are also easy to do and often built into blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress. Having an RSS feed makes it easier for interested people to follow what you're writing about, and maybe also to pass those articles along to others.
  
• Promote yourself on Twitter and elsewhere. You can also directly promote new content on your website or special offers and promotions through micro-blogging sites like Twitter or through MySpace and Facebook. That way your "friends" or the people who "follow" you on those sites will always know when you've got something new.
  
• Reward people for linking. Check out who's linking to your articles and mention them (and/or a piece of content on their website) on your blog. That way people know that they'll get a little promotion out of helping you, which makes them more likely to link to you in the future.
  
• Be a good visitor. Just as you want people to share around your links, you should occasionally share links to sites and articles that you like, as well as leaving comments on blogs that are related to yours. Both of these actions can get you more traffic, particularly if you link to a specific article rather than the front page of your website.
  
  It can take a little time to get into the habit of using social networking tools, but even if you start out with just one you are bound to see an increase in traffic, the number of people linking to you and, ultimately, your ranking in the search engines.