Social Media Optimisation

Introduction: Social media optimisation (SMO) is defined as maximising a web site's potential to be more easily connected or interlaced with online communities and community websites. The benefits of this is to drive awareness and traffic to the website from these communities, create a factor that brings users back to your site, and also give an increase in link popularity that will help a site perform better in natural rankings.

Basic Level SMO: News content, social tagging

1. News Content:

RSS Feeds - RSS is an easy way to help new content on a website such as news articles and press releases reach a wider and targeted audience. RSS feeds can be subscribed to by individual users or can be submitted to news aggregate sites which categorise the news and aids its distribution. When configured optimally, these can count as links towards a site and more importantly they link towards specific pages and possibly deeper content on the site. This helps the articles gain more natural visibility in search engines.

Find out how to create an RSS Feed here

News on search engines - News content on the site can also be submitted to search engine news feeds in order to gain more search traffic from people searching for related key terms. Google, for example, occasionally shows news results in its main search engine results page. In order for the news feed to be accepted by Google, news articles need to have URLs configured with numeric identifiers.

Find out how to get your news content indexed in Google news

2. Social Bookmarking:

Social bookmarking can encourage visitors to share content with their social network or online community. Examples include adding 'Digg' or 'del.icio.us' bookmarks to particular articles of interest or interactive tools. Again this acts to raise awareness of the site within online communities, to drive traffic via these communities but because search engines can follow these links, it will also increase the link strength of the page and hence the overall natural visibility of the site in search engines.

These need to be configured correctly with text links on the pages of interest in order to get the maximum strength from social bookmarks. Many users have a tool bar in their browsers which allows them to socially tag content, however having a link embedded on the page presents a stronger call-to-action for them to do so and also confers greater link strength to the actual page.

More recently, there are sites where you can submit content to multiple social bookmarking sites all in one quick go, such as http://www.socialmarker.com/ (provided you have an account on most of them) - along with combining this technique with the old fashioned commenting on someone elses blog ( if used in moderation),and by that we mean commenting on a site with relative content, and then bookmarking their site too.

3. Rich-Media SMO: Image, video, podcast content:

Search engine results no longer just show text links and results of a search are becoming more media rich with images and video content showing in the results. Google Universal was announced in 2007, which tells of Google's intention to start regularly integrating image and video results in search results.

Therefore all video, audio and image content on a site becomes additional sources of traffic from search engines and needs to be optimised accordingly. This can be done by specifically optimising content within a site but also by submitting content to specialised search engines and hosting sites such as YouTube or Flickr.

4. Profile SMO: Blogs, Social networks (Myspace, Facebook, Bebo), Wikis, Message Boards

Blog Optimisation - Many search engines now either include results from blogs as a result of a search, or even have specific blog search engines. A blog can be optimised in the same way as a site with page titles, header tags, navigation and information architecture. From a search perspective, it is best to have a company blog hosted on the same domain as the company's site although this is not always possible in every situation. Regardless of hosting, attention should be paid to how content on the main site and blog link together in order to maximise the potential of both and increase coverage in search engine results.

Social Network Profiles - These networks can be a popular way to drive awareness within certain demographics. The direct effect of this on natural search traffic is limited since many of the links from these sites do not count towards the popularity of the site being linked to. However, it is important that content on these pages are optimised taking the SEO strategy into consideration - duplicated content can put sites at a disadvantage in search engines.

These profiles can include Myspace, Facebook or setting up a resource on Yahoo! Answers. Even if the sites have no follow tags on the links, all of these can bring traffic to your site as the content on the profiles would be based on the similar topics to your site and content.

Wiki's and Message Boards - These sites can also drive traffic to the various sites if used appropriately. Some of these sites, like with the social networks, do not allow the links towards a site to be counted towards the recipients popularity (mainly to avoid sites exploiting this and leading to spam-filled content). A site such as Wikipedia is one way in which a site can gain search engine listings for very high query terms, for which Wikipedia ranks well. A good article about this can be found here:http://weblogs.hitwise.com/heather-hopkins/2007/07/global_warming_uk_traffic_goes.html

5. Tools & Gadget SMO: widgets & mash-ups

Widgets - Widgets are pieces of content - (example: a desktop widget that allows a user to get sports scores or traffic alerts) - contained in a file which visitors are able to download onto their desktop or embed within their own site and use without multiple trips to the site of origin.

These can also include slide shows from Flickr accounts or embedding YouTube videos within a site. The use of widgets within social networks - blogs, Myspace pages and Facebook profiles - is becoming very popular and provides a valuable way for a site to increase it's awareness and hence traffic to the site. These widgets, depending on the type and configuration, can be optimised so to increase their natural search compliance and overall strength of the site. Plus, if the offering is unique enough, many other people will link to it as a sort of recommendation to their visitors too thus increasing link strength.

Mash-ups - Mash-ups is the use of content and databases by developers to make their own applications based on content from your website. There are many examples of where maps have been used in mash-ups, for example a mash-up with Flickr images and Google maps. Or as is the case with http://www.housingmaps.com/ - which uses info from Craigs list and Google maps.

6. Negative SMO

Just like with bad press, the potential for negative SMO is there. One of the reasons these types of sites didnt do se well in their first run, circa 2000, was because there were not enough people there creating content in order to make it anyway appealing. Now its the other way round. There are too many sources, and often it is hard to tell the real from the mere body doubles. For instance, how many of those myspace profiles are really real? A unique user, not a robot automated user, for a main profile. Less than half would be a safe bet.

Wikipedia started a chain of sites that can easily be amended in unfavorable ways. Sure it tracks you, but there are measures to counter that, such as a proxy.

Even if bad press doesnt affect your ranks, it can cause a blemish on your brand when someone sees the negative listing in the overall mix, beside yours. In the end, SMO is just another form of optimizing your sites content and visibility outside the site itself on places beyond just search engines. Its the new form of reputation management to some, but to others its just a wider variety of ways one can build links to their site. It's up to you to decide what works best for you, and here at eSM we can advise you accordingly.

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