April 1st, 2010 by Mike

Search media optimisation, or SMO, is similar to SEO (search engine optimization) except it relies on social media sites to attract visitors to web pages. It is recognised as a type of social media marketing, which is the promotion and publicising of consumer services and products via social media sites.

Practically every internet user is familiar with social media sites these days, even if they don’t go on MySpace or Twitter. Internet forums, social and personal blogs, wikis, podcasts, instant messaging, picture sharing sites, social networking sites and social bookmarking sites are all forms of social media – and all can be utilised for SMO purposes.

Popular social networking sites used by e-commerce companies include Bebo, Facebook and MySpace. Less well known, but gaining interest, are ASmallWorld, Geni.com and Xing. Social network aggregators, such as FriendFeed, are a useful SMM tool, as they bring the content of different social networking sites together, increasing your chances of optimisation by the search engines.

Blogging is another popular social media tool. Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Xanga and WordPress are among the most popular. Micro-blogging is a simpler form of web log, rapidly gaining interest. The best known is Twitter. It is practically de rigueur, these days, for companies to include Twitter among their social media marketing links.

Social bookmarking sites like Delicious and StumbleUpon are another way to optimise your website. Also called social tagging, bookmarking allows internet users to share, manage and organise the bookmarks of web pages. Metadata tags may be added so users can check the reference is relevant to their needs before downloading the link. Social news sites like Digg and Reddit do a similar thing, but offer links to news sites.

As well as all these there are video sharing sites (YouTube being the obvious example); music and audio sharing pages, photography and art sharing sites (Flickr, deviant Art and Photobucket being among the most popular) and livecasting on sites like Ustream. The latter allows users to do live video streaming of events, and is a useful tool for e-commerce.

Social media optimization takes place in one of two ways. The first adds social media links to the content. These may be RSS feeds, social news links and interactive tools like user ratings and polling buttons. They may also incorporate images and video links. The second method uses activities not related to the web content being promoted, and includes blogging, discussion groups and status updates of profiles.

Whereas SEO concentrates on search engine marketing, SMO concentrates on driving traffic to a site from other areas, relying on the fact that many internet users – especially the young – use social networking sites far more than they use search engines. However, a side effect of SMO is improved search engine rankings, so it works well alongside traditional search engine optimization techniques.

Social media marketing is an important tool to the online business community, allowing companies to reach out to their customers in a new way. With big businesses and high street names now utilising the medium, small companies have gained credibility that search engine marketing alone couldn’t achieve.

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