Social media optimization or SMO is yet another method for search engine optimization of your site. As the name implies, you optimize your site by advertising it through the social media sites, online communities and community websites such as blog sites, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs.

The methods for social media optimization involve the use of RSS feeds, social bookmarking, video and photo sharing, social news buttons and blogging etc. The basic idea is to drive traffic to your site without spending money on search engine advertising.

The concept of social media optimization was introduced by Rohit Bhargawa of Ogilivy Public Relations. Originally, he enunciated five rules for social media optimization, but the list was expanded by other contributors.

According to Rohit Bhargawa, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

In actual practice, social media optimization seeks to create links to the site by making it more visible through the social networking sites like Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, Face Book, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, My Space or search engines like Technorati.

How does one go about social media optimization?

Getting links for your website

The number of links your site manages to pull through decides its popularity with the search engines. It is like deciding the popularity of the leader through the votes he gets. In case of a website its popularity index is the number of links it gets from other websites.

Tagging and bookmarking

Tagging and bookmarking can be made easier by inducting content features such as buttons like “add to delicious” and other bookmarking sites. In addition to this, you can also include relevant tags to your pages besides the home page for the popular social bookmarking sites.

Create inbound links

Inbound links are considered important for the popularity of the site and its content in searching engine ranking. You should create links to the blogs or sites that contain back links to your site and increase its visibility.

Make your content travel

Make some changes in your site to enable your content to travel far and wide in your niche area. This can be done by including portable content such as PDFs, video and audio files and submitting them to your list members as well as sites related to your niche. This will help you to create back links for your site.

Allow others to use your content

A glaring example of this practice is YouTube. You can download its videos to your sites to illustrate your content and make it more interesting. Another example is to use RSS feeds to syndicate your content so that others can use it for their benefit. This can help you to drive traffic to your website.

Pros and cons of social media optimization

As with other methods of driving traffic, social media optimization has become victim of spamming or link farming. While the noble idea behind social bookmarking is to include links to informative, useful and interesting sites, people bookmark – syndicate – their own sites in numerous bookmarking sites unmindful of the quality of their content which can be pirated, duplicate and cheap. It simply eats into the web space of the bookmarking site and creates a kind of content garbage making it difficult to sift grains from the chaff.

Search Engines are extremely unbiased and democratic in nature. If you have the right keywords, content, links and structure, you stand a fair chance to be ranked high, like your competitors, or the people who are out to cause harm. Therefore, by using SEO techniques, you can make the damaging comments ‘disappear’ from the top results on SERPs.

Rememeber, SEO is like a watchdog for your brand. All this while, it has been driving web traffic to your site and helping you make money. Now, you can use it as a powerful tool to fight back negative and undesirable comments.

Start with the Keywords

There is no way that one can play down the importance of keywords for reputation management. If you’ve already optimized your website using a set of keywords, you will have to use different keywords to fight the current problem. Now, focus on those keywords that are creating the maximum ripples and turn them around to your benefit.

Using those “negative” keywords or a specific product name, make a lot of relevant and high quality content. By doing this, you create a good press for the offending keywords and boost the ranks for your website, thereby making an effort to push the damaging pages out of the top few SERPs.

Other SEO Tips

Employ professional bloggers to put up posts about you. Try to organize podcasts and news interviews online for your product or brand. Exchange links with relevant websites Try to buy as many domains as you can, ensuring that they focus on your target keywords Monopolize the PPC spots on major Search Engines. Join social networking sites and participate in fruitful conversations and discussions Hire a good SEO company India

SEO plays an important part in the promotion of website in search engines. There are certain factors that should be taken into consideration and can not be ignored for website promotion. Some of these factors and tips are stated as:

Always create useful content for your website. Content is still considered as the king. And always update the content regularly. The users and web audiences like to read the fresh and latest information and material and this will keep them coming back and stay on your website. Also search engines prefer the fresh content as the spiders crawl it from time to time.

The pages of website should be sticky and interaction related that include discussion boards, helping to build community and with the facility of comment insertion. Creating an email newsletter can be quite effective for SEO services. This is an effective way to link back to your website and continuously drive effective traffic.

RSS feeds are also a great source to keep your visitors informed about the fresh content on your website. Creating an affiliate program also helps to promote your products and services on the website.

Use all effective search engine optimization techniques to get your website listed naturally in the top of major search engines like Goggle, yahoo and msn. Podcasting can also be quite helpful that is a good way to build regular audience and keep them coming back.

Investing in pay per click advertise helps you to bring target driven traffic to your website.

Submitting the article to other websites with link back to your site is also an effective way of SEO services to promote your site. Blogs are also an important way to build fresh content and build regular audience. Build your profiles through social networking sites like face book, my space etc. These profiles can be used to connect others with similar interests and send back to your website.

You can also invest in paid advertising like banner advertising.