SMO = Social Media Optimization / Search Marketing Optimization
SMO. Some call it social media optimization. Others refer to it as search marketing optimization. Either way, it is the next wave of online marketing, the perfect marriage between search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. As a business in the Internet Age, you can’t exist without addressing the critical issues of online visibility and customer interaction. That’s exactly what SMO is designed to do.
When used effectively social media can be one of your greatest assets for improving your site’s organic search results. By connecting with people in various online venues, you extend the reach of your business and increase opportunities for people to link to your main business page. Social media optimization helps connect all of your social media accounts in a cohesive, consistently branded network that points your potential customers where you want them to go. SMO Pros employs a strategic, multi-point process to build your successful SMO foundation, boost your SEO, and drive more potential customers to your site.
Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website:
*Increase your linkability – This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are "static" – meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
*Make tagging and bookmarking easy – Adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
*Reward inbound links – Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating Similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.
*Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
*Encourage the mashup – In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube's idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.