Social Media Optimization, A Basic Marketing Strategy Guide

In the not so distant past search engine optimization was one of the best things you could do to ensure a nice steady stream of traffic.

It's not to say that getting on the first page of Google results isn't a good idea but with the absolute explosion in recent years of social media sites you would be shooting yourself in the foot if you don't get involved in things like Twitter and Facebook.

The sheer volume of users on social networking sites alone should be enough motivation for any blogger to take serious notice and make sure their blog is "shareable." This is the basic tenant of SMO.

Updated Nov 23 - 2010

What is SMO?

SMO is the abbreviation for Social Media Optimization and refers to the method(s) of increasing web traffic of new visitors from Social Media sites and making content more sharable. With SEO falling by the wayside new media will ultimately become one of the emerging hot topics when it comes to blogging.

Even Ashton Kutcher is getting involved launching a social media company called Katalyst which a couple of years ago would be mind-boggling but now is the time to become a social media mogul.

It's about going to the people

The days of "if you build it they will come" are pretty much long gone. Ensuring your blog has great content is just one step in obtaining traffic, it's mainly how you get people to come back. Using social media sites is a great way to funnel people to your blog.

Twitter has an estimated 200 million users. That's a lot of potential readers, and using their interests and what they tweet about as a gauge to whether or not they would be interested in your blog you can reel them in.

If your Twitter account has a couple thousand followers you can in turn legitimately gain hundreds of new visitors a day. Theres no wonder why every large company has their own Twitter account and places it in their ads. Every TV show you see has its own account and it's for good reason. For one it's free advertising and it's where people spend their time online.

Some Basic SMO Ideas You Can Start Using

• Create posts that people will want to bookmark, link to, favorite, retweet, stumble etc.
• Make it easy to do so; social media buttons should be on hand but not overly abused.
• Have new exciting interesting content on hand, an updated blog is a social media gold mine.
• Create the invaluable resource type posts with lists and downloadable content.
• ALWAYS label (tag) your posts and tweets carefully, they will then be picked up by aggregators for sites such as paper.li
• The Twitter #hashtag is your best friend.
• Make your blog do-follow to encourage commenting and trackbacks for linking.
• Use a recent comments or most frequent commenters plugin to further reward participation.
• Find any other type of plugin that rewards people who share your content, anything that shows who linked to you or who is talking about you is a home run.
• Make sure you're submitting your sites to the social bookmarking sites to get the ball rolling.
• Get involved in blogging communities to help spread your content.
• Make it easy for visitors to find your best content. Once they find it you will have a better chance of them sharing it with others.
• Be sure to use a header image or relevant stock image to go with your posts, statistics show that people are more likely to click on a link that has some sort of picture than one that does not.
• When you share a link on Facebook make sure you use this image in the posting. You can search through the thumbnails and find the appropriate image.
• Creating YouTube videos that people will want to link to is great, they also can embed the video in their own blog or forum posts. Making your YouTube videos especially social media friendly.

So what's the last improvement you've made to your blog with social media in mind?

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