social media optimization Social Media Optimization is a new concept for most people and moves us way beyond the meta tag and keyword concerns of old style SEO. In today’s Web 2.o world almost anything you can build a community around constitutes social media including blogs, forums, podcasts and wikis for example. Additonally sites like Digg, Delicious, Facebook, flickr, Technorati, MySpace and a myriad of others qualify. All of these social media sites have potential to drive droves of traffic to your site.

Steven Bradley over at SearchNewz has a great writeup which includes the 19 rules of SMO.

SMO The Next Phase Of SEO “I think one of the main differences with SMO is that it’s about optimizing your site for people more than just for search engines, though optimizing for the social media will also improve your search visibility if done right. Rule number one is to increase your linkability after all. However it’s done through providing content worthy of being linked to.

For years we’ve been optimizing our sites for search engines, but SMO takes the concept a step further and has us optimizing our sites for the social media… SMO is more than SEO in that it aims to bring traffic from a variety of sources beyond search engines. SEOs have been promoting this idea for quite some time and now the idea has a name and an acronym we can all rally around. It’s never a good idea to rely on one source for your traffic and thus your revenue.”