Social Media Optimization (SMO)

Social media optimization means creating interest in your website through online social media. Some good examples of social media sites are YouTube, Facebook and Digg.

SMO does two things:

1. Improves the search engine ranking of your website through increased traffic and linking
2. Gets lots of people interested in your products and/or services before your website is highly ranked on Google

While the success of SEO hinges on high-ranking content, the success of SMO focuses on high-ranking reputation. In other words, people need to really like something about your company or product/service offering. The name of the game is ‘community-building’: building a community of interest around your website and your business. How do we do this? In several ways:

• Your content may be of interest to readers at sites like Digg.com that provide a forum for users to vote on new content. In this way, visitors decide what’s hot and what’s not.

• You may have a product or service that some part of the online community wants to learn more about. Facebook and similar social networking sites are great venues for discussion and further learning.

For example, we have a client that makes carpet without formaldahyde. We bet that was worth talking about, and guess what? They now have several hundred thousand ‘friends’ on Facebook.

• If people really ‘dig’ your website, they spread the word and soon your site is turning up on websites like StumbleUpon and YouTube. News of your fantastic website content goes ‘viral’, whipping around the Internet and earning you dedicated fans and vastly improved search rankings.

When SMO works, it works really well. Traffic can increase to millions of visitors overnight. Search engines take notice, visitors create links from their blogs or websites to yours and your ranking goes up. And people start buying more of your lemonade! The best thing is that SMO complements SEO: good, relevant content is essential for both kinds of optimization to work.

If you would like to learn more about our Social Marketing Optimization techniques, contact RankHigher for a no-obligation discussion of your needs!