Social media optimization (SMO) is perhaps the best kept secret these days in the field of search engine optimization. But what is it and how can you harness its power?
Generally speaking, social media optimization is a form of search engine optimization that targets the increasingly popular user-driven content bookmarking sites, such as digg.com, as sources of traffic and inbound links. This type of SEO strategy can best be described in more traditional terms as an aggressive viral marketing campaign, in which user-driven content forms the “word of mouth” necessary to create a buzz in the online community regarding to a particular website.
Hey? Let’s tackle a few key terms one at a time.
Social media can be defined, for our online purposes, as any website where the content on that site is primarily user-directed. In other words, the site owners don’t create the content, the users do. Some familiar examples might be blogger.com, myspace.com, facebook.com, and similar sites. It would also include social bookmarking sites, which are becoming more and more popular these days, especially among users in their 20s and 30s.
A social bookmarking site is a site like digg.com. There are many of them. These sites generally function as a way to store internet bookmarks online. Think of the familiar “Favorites” folder in your browser. Well, social bookmarking sites do the same thing, but they go a step further. First, social bookmarking allows a user to post their favorite articles, news, or websites online instead of on their local machine. Second, these bookmarks are public, so anyone can browse them and find sites other people have bookmarked. Finally, many of these sites offer additional features, such as user-directed voting or ranking, and adding public comments to each bookmark.
So how can this be used for search engine optimization purposes? Well, it is important to remember that the correct goal of search engine optimization is not just ranking, but traffic, and not just any traffic, but qualified traffic. It has no commercial purpose to be the no. 1 search for a term that isn’t relevant to your site, or getting a lot of unqualified traffic to your site that won’t result in a conversion to sale. When you consider SEO in this context, which is the right one, things start to make more sense.
Social media optimization involves a number of things, which will be detailed in later posts. Generally speaking, though, bookmarking your site’s content on social bookmarking sites creates inbound links, traffic, and a “buzz.” It’s a wonderful way to “get the word out” about your site in no time.
The other advantage of social media is that it creates its own kind of internal quality control. Those who choose to spam a site with low-quality posts will usually be rejected by the social community. Of course, bad publicity is better than no publicity, but we’d all rather have a positive buzz about us if we had the choice. Creating quality, useful, and informative content is crucial to generating a positive buzz about your site.
However, social media optimization involves more than just the act of bookmarking your site. It also involves making your site easy for others to bookmark. This is usually accomplished through a series of bookmark icons placed somewhere within each page of the site, which allow users to post their content to a social networking site with a simple mouse click.
Ethical social media optimization also requires the creation of quality content, as mentioned above. The online community will simply not tolerate useless and banal posts, and the user-driven model of social media encourages a spirit of creativity and originality, all of which contribute to the “mix” of Internet content. In a nutshell, mashup theory centers on the concept of an aggregated web, in which content is pulled from a variety of sources to create a quality, relevant, and informative experience for the web surfer.
Of course, there is much more to social media optimization than this, however this thumbnail sketch should help familiarize you with the key terms and processes. Happy bookmarking!