What is Social Media Optimization?

Social Media Optimization, can help build website traffic by using social media based websites that most of us already know.

The evolution of Web2.0 has seen hundreds, maybe even thousands, of different social media websites crop up in a large number of different guises. Content sharing, social bookmarking, and collaborative websites form the basis of this new wave and it’s these types of websites that you need to use in order to leverage the power of Social Media and the social web.

The nature of using Social Media could be considered a form of guerrilla marketing in the traditional sense. Webmasters and blog writers have the choice of either investing money or their own skills and time in order to generate traffic from social sites. As long as your efforts are directed appropriately, the more work you put in the more reward you will earn and collect.

Social optimization also has a great side effect – it helps to build your link profile so you will usually gain search engine traffic in the long term. Becoming a part of an online community is essential to your social optimization and this, in turn, will automatically provide links to your website.

The links will also normally be from relevant pages based on a similar topic to that of your page, awesome! The more popular social sites are also given a lot of weight by certain search engines.

Optimize Your Existing Hub

Create genuinely interesting, intriguing, or informative blogs on popular subjects. Include images, links and video, and commenting tools so that blog visitors really get involved when they do visit your blog.

SMO is basically a simple digital word-of-mouth and, if your Hub doesn’t provide some kind of appealing experience and information to your visitors, then it simply won’t attract the positive word-of-mouth that you want.

Add new blogs so that you can include more information in your profiles. However, don’t just add blogs for the sake of it – ensure that each blog really does have something unique to offer. A blog still needs to be well built with good, original information.

Don’t spam because that will lose you many more friends than it will make but, if you provide relevant information and a forum or blog allows you to link to it, then provide an insightful comment and provide a link to relevant blog posts.

Be Active on the Social Sites

Being active is a critical part to your entire SMO campaign. Simply registering with social bookmarking sites and content sharing sites is definitely not enough.

You need to be involved, post regularly, and generally become a part of the community. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to do this, then find somebody else to do it instead. Look fora Virtual Assistant, not that difficult to find nowadays.

You really do reap what you sow in terms of SMO. Determine the sites that are most suitable to your blog, join them, and become an active member.

Choose some broad topic sites as well as some that are specific to those interested in the industry in which you operate or topic that you cover in your blogs.

Look at social news submission sites, content sharing sites, bookmarking, and networking sites and try to get a broad coverage of all of them. Here are just a few of the sites you should seriously consider using:

Social News/Media Sharing Websites

• Reddit – Reddit is a very popular social news website that boasts a lot of subscribers and covers a wide range of topics.

• Digg – Initially, Digg was reserved to technology and related topics but is now a broad topic news site that again has a lot of subscribers and regular readers.

• Newsvine – Not as popular as the two above but offering a slightly more formal tone to its content. Again, a good range of topics are covered.

Social Networking Sites

• MySpace – It may be now be largely covered with spam, but there are still too many genuine users for you to ignore MySpace. You don’t have to be a garage band to take advantage either.

• Facebook – Has caused quite a stir and offers users the chance to create and distribute their own applications as well as content. Another very popular site.

• LinkedIn – LinkedIn is a social networking site dedicated to professionals and businesses. It can really help to build a huge network of partners, customers, and other useful contacts in a business network.

Social Bookmarking Websites

• del.icio.us – Register, store bookmarks that you find useful, and include a bookmark to your website and use a public profile.

• Stumble Upon – Same again. Alternatively, you can add a Stumble icon to each of your pages, blog posts, and other media and let your readers do the walking for you.