Social media optimization or SMO is yet another method for search engine optimization of your site. As the name implies, you optimize your site by advertising it through the social media sites, online communities and community websites such as blog sites, message boards, podcasts, wikis and vlogs.

The methods for social media optimization involve the use of RSS feeds, social bookmarking, video and photo sharing, social news buttons and blogging etc. The basic idea is to drive traffic to your site without spending money on search engine advertising.

The concept of social media optimization was introduced by Rohit Bhargawa of Ogilivy Public Relations. Originally, he enunciated five rules for social media optimization, but the list was expanded by other contributors.

According to Rohit Bhargawa, “The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

In actual practice, social media optimization seeks to create links to the site by making it more visible through the social networking sites like Squidoo, Blogger, Hubpages, Face Book, Twitter, Digg, Delicious, My Space or search engines like Technorati.

How does one go about social media optimization?

Getting links for your website

The number of links your site manages to pull through decides its popularity with the search engines. It is like deciding the popularity of the leader through the votes he gets. In case of a website its popularity index is the number of links it gets from other websites.

Tagging and bookmarking

Tagging and bookmarking can be made easier by inducting content features such as buttons like “add to delicious” and other bookmarking sites. In addition to this, you can also include relevant tags to your pages besides the home page for the popular social bookmarking sites.

Create inbound links

Inbound links are considered important for the popularity of the site and its content in searching engine ranking. You should create links to the blogs or sites that contain back links to your site and increase its visibility.

Make your content travel

Make some changes in your site to enable your content to travel far and wide in your niche area. This can be done by including portable content such as PDFs, video and audio files and submitting them to your list members as well as sites related to your niche. This will help you to create back links for your site.

Allow others to use your content

A glaring example of this practice is YouTube. You can download its videos to your sites to illustrate your content and make it more interesting. Another example is to use RSS feeds to syndicate your content so that others can use it for their benefit. This can help you to drive traffic to your website.

Pros and cons of social media optimization

As with other methods of driving traffic, social media optimization has become victim of spamming or link farming. While the noble idea behind social bookmarking is to include links to informative, useful and interesting sites, people bookmark – syndicate – their own sites in numerous bookmarking sites unmindful of the quality of their content which can be pirated, duplicate and cheap. It simply eats into the web space of the bookmarking site and creates a kind of content garbage making it difficult to sift grains from the chaff.

It is really difficult to define spam. But generally speaking, spam is unsolicited information, which is forced upon the reader and is purported to advertise some service or product. The unsolicited information is not provided just once or twice; the reader is, in fact, so much bombarded with the same kind of information that he gets exasperated.

Here are some of the important features of spam.

Spamming through emails

The spammers consider email as the best medium for sending spam. They try to remain anonymous and send mails in massive quantities. The sender addresses are generally spoofed or harvested to conceal the identity of the real senders.

You may also receive political messages, appeals for charities, chain letters and spam to spread malware.

All unsolicited mails are not spam. For example, you have given your email id with a permission to receive messages, newsletters and business proposals. If the sender also sends legitimate business proposals, charity appeals, invitation to seminars, e-books through his emails, they are not considered spam. The reason is that the sender has already sought your permission to send you mails.

Sometimes the unsolicited messages of genuine nature may come from senders who have not sought your permission. Let us say you have only one supplier of certain product that you are trading. You wish you could know some other supplier for a competitive buying.  Suppose you get a message from an Asian producer of the same product who quotes lower rates, then you would not consider this unsolicited message as a spam.

The key word for spam is ‘bombardment’ with unsolicited messages. Spam has spread its tentacles in other forms of internet marketing especially article marketing.

Most article writers tend to cater to the search engines rather than the searchers of information through search engines. Search engines accord prominent display to popular websites on their first pages. Their criterion for popularity of a website is the number of links that connect to that website.

So the article marketers fill up their articles with large number of links to their websites to hoodwink the search engine robots called crawlers.  Not only that, they submit the same articles to hundreds of article directories through automatic submission software. The strategy is to create a deluge of links to fool the search engines.

Since their only objective is to create links, the articles mostly contain duplicate or copied content. Though prominent article directories such as Ezine Articles discourage such articles, there are numerous other article directories that turn a blind eye to such submissions. This type of spamming is called link spamming through articles.

How to treat the spam?

Though you cannot stop the link spamming through articles, as it is for the article directories and search engine robots to devise methods to discourage their submissions, there are several ways you can stop spam in your emails to some extent.

Do not post your email ids on the public forums, newsgroups, chat rooms or websites.

Do not open messages that appear spam

Email service providers usually offer effective tools and filters to stop the spam mail. Yahoo, probably the most popular email service, provides options to do so. You can select all the messages that appear spam and click on the Spam button. They will stop appearing in your inbox. Yahoo also offers spam filters. You should add the spam mail’s id in the prescribed filter box and you will stop receiving mails from that sender.