FundKitchen

What is it? Generally Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a form of search engine optimization (SEO) targetting popular user-driven content bookmarking sites such as digg.com as sources of both traffic and inbound linkage. In more traditional terms, this type of SEO strategy can be described as an agressive viral marketing campaign where user-driven content forms the word of mouth to create buzz regarding a particular website in the online community.

Still don't get it? For our purpose social media can be defined as any website in which the content is primarily user-driven. In other words, the owners of the site don't create the content, but the users do. Some examples might be facebook.com, blogger.com, myspace.com, and other similar sites. It would also include social boomarking site, which becomes more popular these days.

Social bookmarking site such as digg.com generally operate as a way to store internet bookmarks online, like «Favorites» or «Bookmarks» folder in your browser. Social bookmarking sites do the same thing, but take it a step further. First it allows a user to post his/her favorite articles, stories, or websites online - which means visible to every internet users, as opposed to on their local machine - which means visible only to themselves. Secondly, as mentioned above that these bookmarks are public, so that anyone can browse them and find sites that have been bookmarked by other people. Finally, many bookmarking sites offer additional functions such as user-driven ranking and voting and also public comments to each bookmark.

How can this be any good for SEO purposes? Well, it is important to remember that the proper goal of SEO is not just rankings, but traffic, and not just any traffic, but qualified traffic. It brings no good for your business to be number 1 for terms not relevant to your site, or have loads of unqualified traffic that will not result in conversion to sale. Start to make more sense huh?

SMO involves a number of things. However, generally speaking, the bookmarking of your site's content to social bookmarking sites creates both inbound linkage, traffic, and a buzz. It is a wonderful way to «get the word» out about your site.

The other advantage is that it creates its own sort of internal quality control. Those who spam a site with low quality posts will generally get voted down by the community. Of course bad publicity is better than no publicity, but given the choice, we would rather have a positive buzz.

SMO involves more than just bookmarking your site. It also making your site easy for others to bookmark as well. This usually is accomplished by a series of bookmarking icons (shown on the top of this post) placed somewhere within each page of the site, which allow users or visitors to post/bookmark your content to a social media site with a single click of the mouse.

Ethically, SMO also requires quality content as previously mentioned. The community will not tolerate useless posts, and the user-driven model of social media fosters a spirit of creativity and originality to generate a quality, relevan, and informational experience for the netizen.

There are absolutely much more to SMO than this, however this thumbnail article should enlight you with key terms and processes.