Social Media Optimization
Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a term coined by Rohit BHargava an Indian man. He has related this concept with SEO concepts. He said SMO can bring lots of traffic to your site through new channel or routes as it is not only through Google and Yahho or other search engines that drive traffic to your site.
SMO is - The online tool and platform that people use to share opinions, thoughts, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis etc. Example are Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, My Space, etc to count a few.
Social Media Optimization allows to let you populate your links on the web. These links are spread into all your friends and community connections. When sending your links to persons with like interest can give great exposure to your links with your message.
Rules For SMO Are :-
1. Increase Your Linkability
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
3. Reward Inbound Links
4. Help Your Content Travel
5. Encourage the Mashup
6. Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn't Help You
7. Reward Helpful and Valuable Users
8. In way it sounds a whole lot like Marketing 2.0. It is pretty much includes all the new marketing techniques that are becoming popular rolled into one, techniques such as; Linkbaiting, Usability Design, Buzz Marketing, Community Building, and anything that can be considered "pull marketing".
9. Participate - Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster.
10. Know how to target your audience - If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to.
11. Create content - There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will be useful for someone. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a anything, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.
12. Be real.
While social media optimization is becoming very important we should not forget about old SEO either. Google and Yahoo still drive mass amounts of traffic and you can not ignore them. It is all about exploring new mediums and riding these waves. But Still these new mediums are a strong way to do good for your site to do better ranking and business in terms of driving traffic to the site.
