Well the foundation of Social Media Optimization is of course the blog, whilst many other Social Medias exist this is the key tool in most webmasters arsenal. It seems evident that nobody in their right mind would ignore blogging when undertaking any SEO campaign never mind a SMO campaign which is centred on this type of media. However recently the social network has become increasingly popular and yet harder for webmasters to spam, we all remember how easy it was to litter myspace in links, or fake a celebrity who would endorse your product, right?

So it seems most changes that have occurred have occurred to punish webmasters for blog commenting and social network spamming, so the innovation of course is how we get around that.

What’s new with the Blog?

Well we all know that blogs were made nofollow, and then in turn many webmasters pushed the dofollow pluggin to give them a traffic advantage from SEO and SMO’s across the world, and of course, this has worked, the difficulty of course is finding these dofollow sites as they receive so much spam webmasters get fed up, remove the dofollow and then the sites drop off the free lists. The smart idea is to have softwares do it for you, but they are hardly reliable, the dofollow tag has only hurt blogs, as they receive less traffic, fewer comments, and more concentrated spam.

What about the Social Networks?

Well, the spam has been cleaned up so SMO’s really have to clean their act up, but this isn’t too difficult, instead of targeting anyone and everyone, add people who may be interested in your product, the major benefit that has happened in the Social Networking SMO world is their rapid growth outside of America, this of course means that you can target people from all over the world. The ability to target this sort of traffic is invaluable, especially when you are niche marketing. Linked In is of course the favourite for SMO’s at the moment for the simple reason that it allows you to post numerous links not just one or two like other Social Networks.

When discussing Social Media we cannot forget videos right?

Well the video market has been saturated recently with everybody trying to go viral, and get backlinks across the globe. The only real innovation isn’t particularly great, it is video scraping, the logic is that if somebody has a popular video steal it and you’ll be popular too right? Well yes, and while this wouldn’t work on the normal search engines with, let’s say, content. But the bonus for SMO’s with video search engines is that essentially they aren’t quite as clever, you can rank in youtube very easily from simply picking the right keywords and maybe you might rank underneath the original video it is quite easy to rank highly and receive a vast amount of traffic.

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Social Media Optimization

Well, before explaining how social media optimization works it would be poignant to explain what social media optimization is. It is of course on of the less familiar aspects of SEM even to many of the “experts” in this field, who prefer to concentrate on search engine optimization. It is very undervalued and under competed. This, in many ways, makes social media optimization very useful to an SEM although some would say that social media optimization is not part of the job of an SEO or SEM simply because it is not particularly relevant to search engines and doesn’t really give you a big boost in the SERPS. However, if you are implementing SEO then it would be silly not to take advantage of other forms of free marketing online.

The brief definition of  SMO

So explaining exactly how social media optimization works is not too hard to explain, it is the use of social media networks such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter to drive traffic to a website. The difficult bit is explaining how to do it properly.

Many people do trust friend of a friend recommendations and of course the bonus of this is of course it is free to implement yourself and if you wish to have the service on a large scale it is often considerably cheaper than a PPC campaign. This can be a very tantalising offer to small businesses and also the reason why large scale businesses neglect this form of advertising and miss out on its potential benefits.

The problem with SMO is of course that if done wrong your website can look spammy and the “advertising” you have implemented can actually have a negative effect. Also it can be very time consuming to build a network which actually pays attention to what you post. And this is the reason that many people make a particularly poor decision to gain lots and lots of friends using tacky software’s and send out mass spam messages hoping that by law of adverages some people will visit your site. The conversion rates from this sort of advertising are, rather unsurprisingly, low.

The potential benefits

The best benefits you can expect are through word and mouth and the only way to do this is though organic friend building. Requesting people who may potentially be interested in your product not just every random person you see as this, will in turn; only create negative word of mouth. The bonus you can get from word of mouth is self explanatory, you gain traffic, awareness and potentially sales. The other main benefit is that it works in the same way as an emailed newsletter. It keeps people informed about changes to your brand. Surely this is a good thing as it can increase returning custom. So hopefully this article has helped you understand a little bit more about how social media marketing works.

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