For many years now, Search Engine Optimization has been the main source of traffic for most websites. While I totally believe in the usefulness of SEO, there is a new offering we started providing to our clientele known as Social Media Optimization. The idea behind Social Media Optimization is simple: integrate changes to optimize a website so that it is easily linked to, more Liked and more ReTweeted. Below are 5 rules to help you when implementing SMO on your website:
Increase your linkability: This is the number one priority for websites. Many sites are “static”, which means they are rarely updated and used simply for a electronic business card. To optimize one’s site for social media marketing, we need to improve the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great idea. However, there are plenty of other methods such as publishing white papers and thought pieces, or even simply re-writing and re-publishing content that already exists elsewhere into a modernized format. Keep in mind that a bunch agencies provide Content Creation Services if you need some help in building useful and relevant content for your website.
Make sharing, liking easy for your visitors. Adding content features like quick buttons to “Share on Facebook” are some ways to make the process of spreading content easy for your users, but we go beyond this, making sure that posts include a list of relevant tags and making certain to tag our posts first on popular social networking sites.
Reward backlink: Quite regularly used as a barometer to measure the success of a blog or website, inbound links are equivalent to rising in search engine results. To encourage more inbound links, we must to make it quick, simple and provide rewards. Displaying trackbacks on your site provides the reward of additional visibility for those who decide to link to you.
Help your content travel: SMO is not only about making modifications to a site. When you have content that is portable, such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant platforms will help your content spread, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
Encourage mashups – In this world of co-creation, it is a good thing to be more open about allowing others use your content. Publishing your videos on YouTube, for example, is a proven way to gain additional visibility for your content, as people can easily embed the videos on their own websites and blogs. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it simple for others to build mashups that can drive traffic.
There are lots of other tips and techniques that we are starting to uncover as this idea gets more sophisticated. Meanwhile, we are always looking for new ideas in Social Media Optimization to encourage even better thinking.