In person, you spend time asking questions and developing an understanding of what exactly is being communicated. Online, you can spend time leaving comments on blog posts, following up via Twitter and discussing topics in forums. This is great as it helps you get to know the meaning of specific posts, and others can join in on the conversation providing real community involvement helping you get noticed.

How does this help my online reputation and SEO?

It helps your reputation and your own SEO by providing a useful resource for others to read. Think about it. You leave a comment and leave a link to your site. If you provided something of value to the conversation, either by posing a clarification question or expounding on the original post, you’ve provided something of value and other readers will consider checking up on you. Now, this won’t necessarily, directly increase your SEO performance just by posting a comment, but, it will likely get you visitors, if you provide enough value, the blog owner may get in contact with you or even write a post about your comment and link to your site. Now we’re talking.

Take it one step further and get involved outside of blog posts on Twitter or Facebook. Even though not everything is indexed by Google and others, the conversation value and pass-along value transmitted through these services offers a significant amount of benefit to your online reputation. And, as always, more hits means better SEO and more publicity across other people’s blogs and Twitter accounts as well as their Facebook pages. That brings me to another point which I will cover in another post in the near future: Social Networks pass information based on trust.  A link or piece of information passed through a trusted friend is much more likely to get clicked than a link all by itself. Social networks hold massive amounts of power in this respect.

So get involved!

Read blog posts, post comments, share information via Twitter. Become a fan of something on Facebook and create content that is valuable to others. If you give you will receive. It will take some effort, but the internet is a world-wide community of people looking to share something. Content is king. Contribute and get noticed.

It’s the best way to get good, clean content out on the web and make it accessible and easily readable for everyone. Keep everything as simple as possible. This does a number of things for you:

• Increases your productivity
• Increases your reader’s productivity
• Enhances SEO
• Creates a more enjoyable website to view

Think about it. If you keep your site really simple and informational, people might actually visit it as opposed to just your RSS feed. They’ll see your advertisements and more of your content.

My site, already on Page 1 of Google for the term Twitter Rocket, is nothing more than CSS and a few images. Actually, it’s all built off Headway which is one of the simplest WordPress themes I have ever used, but also the most powerful. It is easy to maintain, easy to write and exceptional at SEO.

Go look at www.drudgereport.com. It is arguably a very ugly site, yet it is simple and full of great content. According to www.websitegrader.com It scored an 88% and is in the top 0.01% of traffic on the internet.

If you’re still not convinced, then check out the guys at 37Signals, especially Backpack. It’s simple, clean and so easy to use. It fits the bill of probably 95% + of people and it isn’t complicated.

What do you think? Is simple really this important or is it overrated?