Best Seven ways to Social Media Optimization
Guys, after the interesting discussion on Social Media Marketing, I bring you yet exciting topic to explore – Social Media Optimisation (SMO). Have you heard of SMO before? Well, for those who are not too sure of what it is, it is about making changes to a website, so that it links better and is highly visible on the social media searches on custom search engines. In short, it makes your content easily shareable across the social web. Isn’t that great? After all, that is an important objective behind creating a website.
But hold on, SMO is not about driving traffic alone, it is also about ensuring that people, who have landed there, ‘see’ and ‘read’ the content. This also makes their friends more likely (statistically speaking) to visit your website. Eventually it leads to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Now isn’t that a double gain?
Keep these things in mind while conducting an SMO for your website:
- Increase content linkability: Keep your content updated and fresh. Stale content does not help in optimizing the site for social media. Because, for optimization, it is crucial to increase linkability of the content. Blogs, white papers, informative articles and thought pieces are some ways you can use.
- Simplify tagging and bookmarking: Including ‘calls to actions’ and buttons like ‘add to …’ are undoubtedly great content features. But what perhaps is more important is ensuring pages use a list of relevant tags and making sure to tag the first pages on popular social bookmarking sites. Go beyond just including the homepage.
- Encourage inbound links through rewards: Inbound links are vital for rising in search results and overall rankings. It is often a yardstick of success for a website and a blog. Recreating similarly, using Permalinks, listing recent linking blogs on your site, linking blogs like Yahoo and Google blogs are some ways to provide the rewards of visibility to those who link to you. It is also important to add value and outbound links. This will only help you in the long run.
- Use portable content: Portable content in the form of PDFs, video files and audio file can travel further once you submit them to relevant sites. These eventually drive links back to your site. Always be aware and cued in to the content that works for you.
- Allow others to use your content: It is a good idea to let others use your content, if they have a legitimate reason for doing so. YouTube has shared in a major way, and benefited too. Similarly, linking or associating your content with RSS is also an excellent means of driving traffic to your website. Strive to create content that’s different and creative. Let others use these, in turn, to produce something of their own.
- Get involved: Participate and get involved as much as possible. Being a part of the discussions in the blogs and sites is an excellent thing to do. But do so in such a manner that it seems natural and effortless; not forced.
- Be real: At the end of the day no matter what you do; being real and not projecting something that is fake is what will lead to a desired outcome.
Social media as we all know by now is rapidly changing. Adapt to it and do what it takes to make the most out of it. Try something new or different all the time that helps you stay fresh in the domain. Right now I think SMO is a great new thing for you to start off…so do it folks, and experience the wonders it can do for your websites and blogs!
labs Initiative