Be human (not a spam bot). Blogging and other forms of social media can be narcissistic time-wasters, sure, but they can also be potential gold mines for job seekers and budding entrepreneurs. Just ask Luisa Weiss, who parlayed her recipe blog, The Wednesday Chef, into a dream job as a cookbook editor, or Gary Vaynerchuk, a wine retailer who used Twitter to promote his Wine Library video blog and leveraged the exposure into a seven-figure book deal and a new career as a marketing guru. "A lot of entrepreneurs use their blog or Twitter page the wrong way," Skurnick says. "A company will only post about its new products, or journalists will pop up only to announce a new article. They're not being human." Treat your posts, tweets, and status updates as an ongoing conversation that reflects your voice and personality. And don't forget the essentials: your name at the top of the site, a Contact button, and a carefully crafted About page.

Start networking. If you do take the plunge into blogging or maintaining your own site (get started at WordPress.com or Tumblr.com ), link to well-established sites related to your field of expertise, and ask friends and contacts to link to you. Search engines generally prioritize sites ending in .edu and .gov, so if you have contacts in higher education or the government who will link to your site, the connections may boost your Google rankings.

Know your terminology. Say you're starting a daycare center: When writing copy for your business website, you'll want to know if potential clients will more likely search for "daycare," "childcare," or "babysitters." To research the answer, go to Google's Keyword Research Tool ( Google.com/sktool ). And pay attention to your "anchor text," the underlined words that users click on to visit a different page. Click here means nothing to a search engine, but Find a childcare provider says a lot.