Most of us leave off thinking about search engine optimization while we’re connecting with others on social media, but that really needs to change. With Google and other search engines taking tweets and social media posts into account, we need to be thinking of SEO for everything we say online.

This doesn’t mean that everything you say or do has to be loaded with keywords. However, you should certainly keep SEO in mind while working online. Negative SEO is just as important . . . do you really want a few thousand people noticing your comment on a controversial topic when you were responding to someone on Twitter? Remember that everything you say can be found again.

On the plus side, social networking can really benefit from having some carefully applied search engine optimization techniques. You do have to be extra careful, since people are watching for auto-bot responses and such on most social media venues.

How do you start using SEO in social media? Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Profiles: All your profiles should cover all your most important keywords. These can be scattered throughout the description, just be sure not to spam or make it sound unnatural. The profile is the best place to start because you have plenty of options for creating proper sentences with your keywords in them.

Status Updates: These may not show up on search engines, but they are still quite important for anyone doing searches. In networks like Twitter, status updates are quite public and searchable via several search engines, so it is well worth it to make sure you get some keywords in each one. Again, be careful not to make your status look like spam or no one will pay attention to it.

Notes and Posts: These should always contain keywords and are often searchable, particularly when using a forum format. Whether you are working in a private network that search engines can’t find, or not, you will want to use keywords because people can still search within the site and you want to be in the results.

When optimizing your social networking, you will need to be particuarly careful. If you have keyword phrases that just don’t work in normal speech, leave them out. The first purpose of social marketing is to be social and you can’t do that if you come off sounding like a spammer. Make sure you are putting people first, keywords second.

Of course, in order to pull this off, you need to be aware of what your best keywords are and make sure that you can use them easily enough in everyday conversation.

Are your social networks optimized?