Like search engine optimization (where you build a site or blog that the search engines like), there is now social media optimization.  With SMO, your site (or blog) is designed to encourage social interaction and viral marketing behavior.

What follows are are a number of tips to help you better optimize your sites:

Note: The source of this is The Social Media Optimization Manifesto.

Increase Your Linkability: To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.

Make Tagging and Bookmarking Easy: Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).

Reward Inbound Links: Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using  Permalinks to recreating similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.

Be a User Resource, Even If It Doesn’t Help You: Add value to users, including outbound links to areas that could help them with their goals and purposes. Deployed corrected, even if you link to competitors you stand to gain as the communities first source of information finding.  How will this help  SMO? Folks will link to your social site and tag is as helpful or the ‘ultimate’ guide in that space. As this adds up, it will become more and more relevant in search engine results.

Reward Helpful and Valuable Users: Often helpful or popular users will be influencers and champions within your social site, devise ways to elevate them by promoting their works on the homepage, or develop a rating system. Sometimes a quick email or note in private telling them you appreciate them can go a long way.

Participate: Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster.

Create Content: There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a white paper, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.

Are you using the above tactics?  Have they worked for you?  I’d like to hear from you.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 8:01 am and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.