Social Media Optimization (SMO) is an essential ingredient within your SEO campaigns. Years ago, social networking sites were little more than a rarity. Today, several of them have received enormous ranking authority from major search engines. If you’re not leveraging them to increase your exposure and communicate with your niche audience, your search engine rankings are vulnerable to your competitors.
In this article, we will describe the influence that social media optimization currently has on search marketing. We will also give you the rules of engagement to run an effective SMO campaign. We’ll explain what social media SEO is and the advantage of hiring an experienced SEO consultant to spearhead your social media optimization efforts.
The influence of social media optimization on search marketing
Search marketing has always been linked to search engine exposure to generate targeted traffic. For years, getting that exposure was based solely on building your site and generating links pointing back to your site. Both are still important today. However, SMO has changed the landscape of search marketing.
Google once maintained several disparate search platforms for blogs, videos, news, and similar types of “social” content. Each functioned as a separate search engine with its own set of natural listings. A few years ago, Google mixed the listings from each platform into a system called Universal Search. Yahoo and Bing have since incorporated similar systems. Universal Search is now used as the primary index. That means blogs, videos, and news have been added to the natural listings, pushing many sites off the front page. This is one of the reasons why social media optimization has become such a critical piece of research.
Another factor that has influenced search marketing is the increased ranking authority given to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and similar sites. They have also quickly gained control of a significant amount of search territory. SMO preserves your current natural listings while helping you gain even more search exposure. By using blogs, videos, and social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, you can capture a greater number of organic positions.
Your Social Media Optimization Campaign: Rules of Engagement
There are several rules of engagement for launching and running a social media optimization campaign. If you ignore them, your SMO efforts will be much less effective than they would otherwise.
First, you need to do everything you can to encourage your audience to link to your site. The integration of a blog is valuable because its content can be updated over time, attracting loyal readers. Encourage readers to tag, bookmark, and “tweet” your blog posts by installing a button plugin.
Second, link generously as a resource to your visitors. SMO relies heavily on helping others achieve what they are trying to do. Once you engage with your audience, help them find the resources they need by linking to them. Eventually, your site will be considered a resource center, helping you attract inbound links. That is a vital component of SEO.
Third, you must be able to identify your market. Social media optimization depends on the connections you make with niche communities. You need to target them properly to generate content and engage them. This is true whether you engage them through YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, or your blog.
Fourth, integrate tracking tools to monitor and measure the success of your social media optimization campaign. Track mentions of your site and business. Watch your site progress in the organic listings for your top keywords. Generate link reports showing inbound links pointing to your domain and specific pages. Tracking your metrics is critical to determining if your SMO campaign is effective.
SEO and SMO explained
Each of the elements of a social media optimization campaign that we’ve outlined so far fits perfectly with SEO. Ongoing content creation, tagging and bookmarking, attracting inbound links by being a resource to your audience, are essential to boosting your website up the search engine listings. Social media SEO optimization takes advantage of a new set of tools to achieve the same goal as SEO: more exposure for your site on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. The challenge is knowing how to use those tools effectively.
The days of launching a basic SEO campaign within a competitive space and watching your site rise in search engine results are long gone. SEO has become much more complex than it was just a few years ago. This is why many companies have made the decision to hire an SEO consultant. SMO has transformed SEO from a relatively simple strategy into a complicated science. Having an experienced hand behind the wheel helps navigate uncertain terrain. If you want to increase your exposure in search engine listings, make social media optimization a priority.
