There is an interesting offshoot of search engine optimisation and internet marketing that has gone on to become extremely popular in its relatively short lifetime. A term has been coined for this new development and that is SMO, or Social Media Optimisation.
Social media refers to a particular collection of sites and networks within the realm of what has been labelled Web 2.0.
“Web two-point-what?” I hear you cry.
Well if this term is new to you then let me explain a little further. Basically Web 2.0 refers to a second generation of web applications and communities that are largely driven by user generated content. Two of the most popular of these sites being Facebook and Youtube.
But though these may be the most celebrated, or widely known at least, they are certainly not the be-all and end-all of social media. There are a multitude of social networks scattered out like small seaports across the vast ocean that is the internet, covering practically ever niche you could hope to imagine and quite a few you probably wouldn’t want to. This has opened up a wealth of new opportunities for the promotion and marketing of websites, away from the reliance upon search engine positioning.
But that is not all. There is a small thing called the blog, which you may have heard of, a wonderful device that has revolutionised the internet in recent times.
You might think of the blog (weblog) as being just an account of your day to day, week by week activities, but it can be a lot more than that. Blogs have come a long way in the past ten years (when the term weblog was first coined), from what essentially was nothing more than a list of favourite links, to the more popular diary format, right up to present day where it has become a source of journalism for the masses; where opinion, information, conjecture and debate are thrown freely about cyberspace with reckless abandon.
This has opened up a whole new avenue for the marketing of your website. If you are regularly providing valuable and informative content and it is being successfully promoted through various social media sites and niche networks, it can bring an enormous amount of traffic into your website.
This holds yet another advantage, in that if you have great content and a regular flow of visitors coming to check you out, it can build lots and lots of naturally formed backlinks. As we all know, plenty of links pointing into your site are a good thing. They mark you out as an authority site and that’s what Google likes to see.
“But I run a small restaurant, I only want a website to promote the business. How’s a blog going to help me?”
Well not only can you tell people of how the business is going and talk up your successes, but you can keep them abreast of upcoming promotions and local events. And you’re running a restaurant after all, so provide cooking tips and recipes. Think outside of the box, a blog can be as successful as you make it.
And finally there is also the fact that you’ll have fresh, new content regularly flowing into your website, which in turn impacts on your search rankings, as Google and their search engine brethren value regularly updated sites over those that sit stagnant and unchanging, and reward them for their efforts in the search engine rankings.
Social media and social media optimisation have become the buzzwords of late in internet marketing circles, and it doesn’t look as though they’re about to go away any time soon.
SEO companies have set up departments to deal specifically with social media and social media optimisation, creating social media profiles with which to promote their client’s websites.
If a business has neither the time, writing skills, nor passion to update a blog then they can hire somebody to ghost-write it for them, another facet of social media optimisation.
So what is actually out there and how should you go about dipping a tentative toe into this exciting new world?
Well there are numerous sites that deal with what is called social bookmarking. These not only provide valuable links into your site but they also put your content on offer, so to speak, so that it is visible to other users and can be voted upon, thus increasing its visibility and popularity and bringing more visitors to your site and naturally more links.
StumbleUpon is one such site, where registered users submit content, blog posts, web pages, etc. that they’ve enjoyed, for others to vote upon. It uses a thumbs-up/ thumbs-down system to cast a vote in favour of or against a particular webpage. The more thumbs-up it gets the more it will be pushed either at the site or through the StumbleUpon button on the StumbleUpon toolbar.
The opportunities for promoting a website through such networks doesn’t need spelling out and after all, it is website promotion that we are dealing with here. However, it pays not to be blatant about such methods, for the chances are you will get found out. Join a network, make friends, get to know how it works and what the end-user audience is like. Most importantly, don’t solely submit or only vote for your own content. There is a reason it is called social media and that is because it is about community and the building and maintenance of social groups online. You will only succeed in ostracising yourself from the rest of the community if you are seen to be manipulating them in any way for your own agenda. Make sure you take an interest, be active, and contribute as much as you intend to take away.
Of course, many businesses don’t have the time to build up a social profile and this is why they hire somebody who is already established within such networks and knows the etiquette and the ins and outs to build their profile for them.
So there ends a brief window into the world of social media and SMO and the benefits it can bring to both SEO and Internet Marketing as a whole.
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