What is Social Media Optimization?

The first step in social media marketing is optimizing your site for inbound link

If you’re familiar with Search Engine Optimization, let us introduce you to its new-ish and rather popular sibling, Social Media Optimization. Likely, you’re less familiar with the term than you are with what it includes.

In short, Social Media Optimization is the process of optimizing your site for social media. For example, adding buttons for digg.com, del.icio.us, technorati, etc. is the smallest step in social media optimization. After this, the process gets more involved but the inbound links will build even faster.

The purpose of this blog bling-bling, which includes buttons, links, tags, etc. is to let anyone who wants to link to you, link to you. In the process, you are increasing your rank in Google with every inbound link you receive.

The three reasons why these networking tools have taken off:

1. SMO connects search marketing to social media. Over the past few years, search marketing has been the darling of the interactive marketing community, with more and more time and sessions at just about every online marketing event dedicated to search. Yet recently, the new darling of this same community is social media and viral/wom marketing. SMO bridges the gap between the two, and so far has been primarily driven by those in the search marketing community.

2. SMO is about optimization. Part of the reason why SEO is so popular is that is focuses on a site or blog that already exists. For many organizations or individuals, the concept of SEO offers an attractive alternative to conducting a redesign, rebranding, or more hugely involving activities. Optimizing a site that already exists makes sense. SEO makes sense. SMO offers the same appeal.

3. SMO is actionable. This could easily be first on the list, but all the initial discussions about SMO on several blogs were centered around “rules.” Though conversation has gotten much broader, the fact remains that there are tangible things that webmasters, bloggers and just about anyone else can do to implement SMO on their sites. This makes SMO a concept that can be easily understood and used by anyone who has a site online – and not just web marketing pros.