SMO basically stands for social media optimization. You may have known about SEO but SMO is a new word in the online dictionary. To start with, it's important to understand what are these social media platforms? Sites that are not strictly trade oriented but their actual focus is on social interactivity are said to be social media sites.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) can be regarded as an advanced version of Search engine optimization or SEO. In simpler terms, SMO is the next advanced level of Internet Marketing which if combined with traditional SEO will surely reap a great success in your online business.

SMO is related to Search Engine Marketing (SEM), but differs in several ways, primarily because the focus is on creating website visitor traffic from sources other than search engines. Improved Search Engine Results Page (SERP) rankings and higher Google Page Rank could also be benefits of a successful SMO strategy.

For advertisers, effective SMO is not about trying to infiltrate forums and blogs to promote your brand. What we want to do is create interesting content with a strong 'hook' and bait other people to comment on it - to build our brand into communications by providing information that is remarkable, high value and relevant to specific groups of people.

RSS Feeds

Providing RSS Feeds for your services, products, blogs, etc allows users to know instantly what has changed on your website through the use of a Feed Reader. RSS Feeds help to get your content distributed across the web and is a simple way to tap into the Web 2.0 technology.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is the other important aspect of SMO. This includes adding social bookmarking tools as well as specific bookmarking services like bookmarking and tag optimization for del.icio.us, reddit, digg, frank, Netvouz, furl, blinklist, technorati and other social bookmarking portals.

Digg: Members of this site can vote, bury and even comment on stories that are submitted by others. A position in the front page often generates huge traffic to your site and the effects are long lasting. Create unique titles for your stories and implant the 'Digg This' button so that users can easily submit their content.

The marketing strategy will include increasing link, making tags, easy bookmark, reward inbound links, create user friendly content and give helpful links wherever required. They also try to incorporate links and add more useful information. Adding more user resource might not help much but still the customers feel that they have come to a genuine website.

Social media optimization is all about floating your content so it could easily be found, circulated, and shared by the community. This may be done by inserting a "Digg This" button on your site blog or it may mean spending hours to create a piece of convincing content (linkbait) that generates thousands of visitors to your site.

SMO has tremendously made the dealings and communication among common people quite simpler and comfortable. However, with proper planning and strategy, the ranking of your web site can drastically touch the sky by the help of SMO social media optimization.