What is “social media optimization” anyway?

June 14th, 2007 · 6 Comments · Tags: Blogging & RSS · Internet Marketing

Social media optimization is the new name of the web traffic game. If you want to keep generating traffic for your website, you must learn the rules and apply them to your website immediately.

Long gone are the days when search engine optimization (SEO) was enough to drive a flood of traffic to your website. While most old school marketers are still trying to figure out the pesky nuances of the latest “Google dance”, younger and savvier webmasters understand that we’re now serving two masters: SEO has become the evil twin - and SMO (social media optimization), his shiny happy sibling.

So what is SMO?
Wikipedia defines SMO as: “A way to optimize web sites so they would be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites, also called social media sites.”

And how can I SMO my site?
From a webmaster’s point of view, the art of SMO is quite simple. You must implement changes to each page in the site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches (like digg and del.icio.us) and on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

3 Quick steps to start SMO’ing your site today!

Step 1) Start producing content and promote it actively.
I know this piece of advice may sound obvious, but you’ve all seen all those sites out there that are nothing but static HTML pages that haven’t been updated or changed in years. This is a big no-no in SMO… you must always be posting fresh and useful content for your visitors. Adding a blog to your site is a BIG step forward.

Once you have new content, posting it to your site alone won’t cut it anymore. You must actively promote it by submitting it to social media and relevant sites. This is specially convenient if your content is produced in a portable format (like PDF files, mp3 audio files, video files).

Step 2) Make it easy for visitors to link, tag and bookmark your pages:
This part is easy. All you need to do is add some social bookmarking and tagging buttons to all your website pages.

* If you run static HTML or PHP pages, use this bookmarking links generator.

* If you run a WordPress blog, use the “sociable plugin” to do it automatically.

Step 3) Quit being selfish – share, share, share!
The web is changing to be a co-creation environment. It pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason, of course). The idea of providing code so that others could embed your videos in their pages is one of the factors that skyrocketed YouTube into stardom. You can start doing this by creating an RSS feed for your site and encouraging others to mash it up and syndicate it.

You’ve got homework.
If your site is not social media optimized yet, go ahead and start doing it now. I guarantee that as soon as you get involved with web 2.0, you’ll never see the internet the same way again. Ohh, and by the way, the amount of web traffic you can receive from following these simple steps is absolutely incredible.

One final tip (for internet marketers and business owners): NEVER try to SMO your money pages. Trying to get people to “vote” for your sales letter or product pages is just plain ridiculous. The ones who dare try it suffer the wrath of an angry ten-million-man mob.