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 social networking sites, online communities, and community websites such as blogging sites, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and blogs.

Methods for social media optimization involve the use of RSS feeds, social bookmarking, video and photo sharing, social news feed buttons and blogs 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 has been expanded upon by other contributors.

According to Rohit Bhargawa, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site to make it easier to link to, more visible in social media searches on custom search engines (like Technorati), and listed more frequently on relevant blog posts, podcasts, and vlogs.”

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

How do you do to optimize social networks?

Get links for your website

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

Labeling and markers

Tagging and bookmarking can be facilitated by inducing content features like buttons like “add to delicious” and other bookmarking sites. In addition to this, you can also include relevant tags on your pages other than the home page of popular social bookmarking sites.

Create inbound links

Incoming links are considered important for the popularity of the site and its content in the search engine ranking. You must create links to blogs or sites that link to your site and increase your visibility.

Make your content travel

Make a few changes to your site to allow 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 sending it to your list members as well as sites related to your niche. This will help you build back links to your site.

Allow others to use your content

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

Pros and cons of social media optimization

As with other methods of generating traffic, social media optimization has become a victim of spam 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 on numerous bookmarking sites without regard to the quality of their content, which can be hacked, duplicate and cheap. It just eats up the web space of the bookmarking site and creates a kind of crap of content that makes it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.