SEO Kolkata - Experienced SEO Consultant India, Kolkata

Lately I have been pondering over the concept of SMO ( Social Media Optimization ) and SEO and what exactly is common in them. It goes without saying, there are two main factors that are actually common for SEO and SMO.

1. Content


2. Links

Yes, while, SMO or social media optimization is all about increasing the linkability of your website , all of us who have had a love-hate relationship with the search engines do know that one thing that search engines love without an exception is links. So Links are important for BOTH !

Now, if you would notice the two-point list that I have mentioned above mentions "Content" as point (a) and "links" as (b) - that was intentional! Because - you get links only and only if you have good content. So CONTENT comes first !Also, I would like to point out that while creating your content for SMO, make sure you put a Title that grabs the attention.It has been observed that articles and write ups with attractive titles and lists ( top 10, top 50, last 5 etc) gets bookmarked more easily.

For proper SEO success you need to have good optimized content on your website but for SMO its not just enough to have good content - you need to increase the linkability of the content.Provide your visitors with easy to link options. They are actually trying to help you by linking to your content so why not help them to help you by making your pages easy to link. A great tool for creating social bookmarks can be found at Social Bookmarks to enhance SMO effort

Now, when we talk about links, we all know

1. Search engines love links - the more inbound links you have, the better it is for you.


2. Social Media Optimization increases the linkability of your content and efficient SMO can get you huge number of links.

Keeping this two points in mind, we can easily derive that SMO can actually work as an effective tool for successful SEO. As an additional bonus, the type of links that a site gets through Social media optimization also drives loads of traffic unlike the exchanged links dug deep inside some links.html or linkpartners.php page, that are often a part of typical SEO process.

While there are people discussing if SMO is going to replace SEO, besides, being a great traffic source, SMO can actually be the means to successful SEO.SMO demands good content and those good content is going to get linked. Now once, you have got content and you have got enough links to that content - do you think you need much more for SEO success ? yes, you need to add the salt, pepper and seasonings to serve just the perfect dish that those BIg three ( Google, Yahoo, MSN ) would love but the foundation to your SEO success has already been laid by your SMO initiatives.

Labels: content, linkability, links, optimisation, SEO, smo, social media optimization

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Social Media Marketing has been doing the rounds amoung Internet marketers and Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations has given it a kick start with his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

He has lucidly explained the concept as

“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.”

Further contributions to the list of 5 rules was done by

Jeremiah Owyang - Rules of Social Media Optimization
Cameron Olthuis - Introduction to Social Media Optimization
Loren Baker - Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
Lee Odden - New Rules for Social Media Optimization

Here's a brief list of all the rules that we have got on Social Media Optimisation till now :

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
    

After reading through all these 16 rules in details, it inspired me to add the following two :

17) Encourage new participants : "Social media optimization" as the name suggests is a social process and as with any social process, it would be most beneficial and effective with increasing number of participants. Lee Odden sited,

"According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it."

Now the 10% enriching the content and the 90% consuming it are actually depending on the 1% who are creating the content.So if the existing participants in this process can encourage each other to take up the role of "content creator" or atleast secondary contributors ( who enrich the content) this will inturn increase the total numberof participants in the social media optimization process making it more effective for everyone involved with it.

18) SMO should be a continuous process : For any company to actually benefit from SMO, they should make it a continuous process. While we all understand that SMO is most effective in creating buzz, we need to understand that these buzz that is created has a particular life cycle and is bound to die out at a certain point of time.In order to sustain this buzz we need to continuously fuel it with more linkable contents, more participation and application of the priniciples explained in the previous rules.

just my 2 cents :)

Labels: bookmarking, Cameron Olthuis, Jeremiah Owyang, Lee Odden, linkability, Loren Baker, Rohit Bhargava, smo, social media optimisation

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Links, Links and Links !! Most of the Internet entrepreneurs who have atleast some idea about the search engines are often engrossed about links. Yes, Links do play a very important role to affect a website's search engine rankings and the business it does. However, in most cases, I have seen that webmasters are more concerned about getting inbound links from external sites and often tend to ignore the internal links.

We need to understand while external links are important, internal links are actually the life line of any web based business.

As a webmaster you would definitely want your visitors to be able to visit every part of your website and for that they need a easy navigation path. Your need to set up your internal links in a way that they guide your visitors in a logical path throughout the website. Though a cool flash menu or an equally atractive Javascript menu might be pretty interesting for some visitors, think about those visitors whose browser do not support scripts or flash - It is most important that you provide a simple HTML links for all your pages.

Besides, this ensures that search engine bots are also able to crawl your site properly. Search Engines hate flash or JavaScripts and they would not crawl the links you set in them. Feed the bots with plain HTML links and your pages will definitely be indexed.

To add to it, if you are using suitable anchor texts to link to relevant pages that adds more value to your internal links. For example, in your site about Widgets, you can have a particular page about Red Widgets - linking to that page using the text "Red Widgets" is much more beneficial compared to using "Widgets1" or "Other Widgets" etc for the anchor text. This helps your visitors to understand where the link leads them to and also the page gets benefit in terms of search engine positioning.

In addition to enhancing the navigation system and facilitating search engines to crawl the site properly, your links can also help to increase your conversion - Yes, Links can affect your sales.

Think of a big retail shop, you have just picked a shirt that you like and have almost made up your mind to buy it but you dont see a salesman anywhere -- you might just consider looking for a few other shirts and in the process forget about the one you thought you would buy :( Yes - this happens in web too !!

If you want to increase your conversion add links stratezically; if there's a page giving small intro about the various products you sell make sure all of them have a link directly to the page that gives details about the products and from there it should have a prominent link to the order page.Make your links attractive and easy to recognize so that more people clicks on it.

When I say, "Make your links attractive and easy to recognize" - I really don't mean something flashy or zazzy.. it has been observed that most Internet users are more likely to click on the same old Blue Underlined Links compared to the fancy ones that we blend in with other content using our CSS skills.From the advent of Internet that was how a link used to look originally and in my opinion its basic e-ntuition that people tend to click or hover their mouse over any Blue and underlined text on the web. I am sure most of you have already done that to the above phrase , even though it is not linked.

Dan gives a lot of good stuff on this and also how to track which links are more effective for your website. He has mentioned quiet a few analytics tools and stresses a bit on measuring "average page views per visitors", though click through rate on a link is probably a more accurate measure for the links effectiveness (because a page may be accessible through multiple links and you might just change the link at one place for testing purpose). I personally find Google Analytics pretty handy for this. The "Site OverLay" link found under Executive Summary section will show you the click through rate for any link on a particular page of Your website. You can very easily compare the click through rates on a link blended using CSS and later by putting it back to the blue and underlined form.It is important that you do the testing on a measurable amount of traffic (atleast 1000 visitors) to get proper identifiable results.

Labels: anchor text, dan thies, experienced SEO, links, navigation, navigation structure

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