March 19th, 2010 by Dan

In the last few years, the popularity of social networking has soared. It seems hard to believe that not too long ago, no-one had even heard of sites like Facebook, Digg or Twitter, and now they take up an incredibly large portion of our time. Just about everyone has accounts on at least one of these sites, and that’s what makes social media optimization such a great way to increase your internet presence.

Social media optimisation, or SMO, has shackled itself to the success of social networking and is going along for the ride. It’s one of the newest and easiest ways to improve your search rankings, and with the popularity of these kinds of sites it makes incredibly good business sense.

SMO alongside search engine optimization uses the social arena as a way to boost rankings by encouraging interaction and keeping people interested in the business as a whole. With so many people using these sites it’s a great way to advertise and to keep the business at the forefront of people’s minds, and a few carefully-thought out profiles can lead to huge success.

But, simply signing up with one of these sites isn’t going to be enough to succeed. It takes time to cultivate successful social networks, and people aren’t going to be interested in a profile that seems inactive or uninteresting. It’s essential to keep fans, friends or followers interested in what’s going on, and that means regular updates and blog posts to encourage interaction and interest.

It’s important to engage with other people across the web as well, and that means starting discussions or commenting on other people’s activities. As long as you remember to adhere to codes of best practice – and that means no blatant spamming and no social faux pas – it can be a great way to increase your presence in the social scene.

It’s advisable to have more than one account to hit your target audience from all sides. A Facebook page can be invaluable in helping to advertise through social media, and many companies use their pages to their advantage. Twitter allows your customers to be easily and quickly kept up-to-date, making sure that they never forget who you are, and Digg means that you can link to your blog posts to get even more traffic.

And, as well as blog posts being a way to keep content fresh  and updated, they can also be a sneaky way to add in a few extra keywords as well. If misspellings are part of your SEO link building strategy, it’s possible to add a few misspelt comments into the mix to hit the target perfectly. This means that the site itself hasn’t lost credibility, but it makes it more likely that the post will appear in search results.

As you can see, although SMO is a relatively new tactic in the quest for higher rankings and SEO, it can really be used to incredible effect. It keeps customers updated on the happenings of your business and, as long as content is kept regularly updated, they’ll keep coming back for more. Never overlook SMO as an easy and effective way to advertise and increase your online presence, and if you do it correctly you’ll soon start seeing results.

Link to us

If you want to link to this blog, copy and paste the following HTML code to your website.