Social this, social that. The whole world is talking about new strategies and recommendations on social media marketing and how it is at the forefront of the internet marketing world. Did you know that you can increase the visibility of your online profile by correctly optimizing it? Have you ever heard of social media optimization (SMO)? Do you want to know what it means?
Social media optimization is the process of optimizing your online presence to be more visible in social media searches, sites and popular search engines. It is also the process of making your profile more easily linked by other sites, and more frequently discussed online in blog posts and other social media mediums.
Is Social Media Optimization new?
Even though it has been around for a long time, SMO is a new concept in the online marketing battlefield. With social media optimization, you can reach every corner of the globe both as an individual and a company. This can help you to broadcast your message to targeted users and businesses at the right time.
Every business participating in social media activities should also focus on social media optimization to enhance their profile and to become more visible. The greatest benefit to SMO is the instant exposure and influx of inbound links that it creates. Find below a couple of reasons why your business should explore SMO strategies:
- Everyone can be a content creator;
- It can increase your linkability;
- It can increase your visibility;
- It can increase your credibility;
- Get your message instantly in front of the right audience;
- Reach every corner of the globe as an individual and a company;
Google search returns millions of results. People are getting more clever by the day with their searches. They are not searching any more, but filtering the results to find exactly what they are looking for.
In this first part of social media optimization fundamentals I will be discussing blogs. I will cover other social media mediums in follow-up posts.
Blogging
Whether your goal is professional or personal, blogging builds credibility and creates a readership if your content is unique and informative.
Unique Content
Popular search engines loves unique relevant content. Create subject specific blog posts and categorise the content in a way that will deliver a boost to your keyword strategy. If you invest in unique content you are building a valuable intellectual property asset that will benefit other areas of the business as well as improve your search rankings.
Increase your linkability
Find below a couple of tips to increase the linkability of your blog so that people can find it fast or the information that you are broadcasting on it.
- Update your content often;
- Create sticky content features (downloads, lists);
- Use catchy headlines;
- Use the permalink conventions;
Increase your visibility
To increase the visibility of your blog, add bookmark quick buttons to your posts so that people can save your content to their favourite social bookmarking websites. Add relevant tags to each post in your blog so that these can appear in blog aggregation websites like Technorati , Afrigator or myScoop. Claim your blog posts first by bookmarking them on del.icio.us.
Reward the inbound links of your blog
Display pingbacks, trackbacks and comments on your blog. Add a list of blogs that links to yours and a recent comments section to feature contributors. You can also offer thanks to your contributors by adding a comment to a linking blog post.
Make your content travel
Syndicate your blog RSS feeds and provide links for users to subscribe. Also offer email subscriptions to your content. You can submit your own content to Digg and other popular content websites if your content is relevant and unique. Inform other bloggers you admire about your posts.
Sharing is caring
Find blog networks that can help you distribute your content. Pursue guest authors or contributor arrangements with blogs in your industry to spread the word about your own blog.
Marketing your blog
Even though the normal SEO rules also applies to your blog, other measures can be made to make sure your blog posts are more visible.
- Send trackbacks and pingbacks;
- Always add keyword driven tags in your posts;
- Use relevant categories;
- Distribute to social bookmarking websites and relevant social media news websites;
Final Notes
One of the greatest benefits of optimizing an active blog is that it will boost your search engine rankings. You can generate substantial amounts of traffic to your blog via RSS feed aggregation websites like Technorati and Afrigator (there’s hundreds of them) as soon as you publish a new blog post.
In the upcoming posts in this series, I will be discussing social media optimization fundamentals on other popular social media mediums.
Sources: Rohit Bhargava | Social Media Optimization: An Easy Guide to Marketing and Promoting Your Blog
Watch this space for the next part of this series.