Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO. Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking sites. SMO includes various fields like RSS Feeds, content base sites, bookmarking & link submission, story & article submission, audio & video submission etc. MySpace, Del.icio.us, Miniclip, Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Flickr, Kaboodle, Squidoo, Wetpaint, StumbleUpon are some excellent examples of it.

• Increase your linkability - You will have to increase the linkability of the content in your web site so as to optimize your web site for social communities. You can develop a web blog to do the same; however there are also some other ways like creating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.


• Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Traditional bookmarking & tagging includes adding content features like quick buttons to "add to del.icio.us" are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).


• Reward inbound links - Inbound links are used as a measurement for success of a blog or a web site. Inbound links have more influence in search results and have impact on overall rankings. From using Permalinks to recreating similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you and also increase your visibility in the search engines.


• Help your content travel - It is not similar to SEO where you optimize your content according to your website & search engines. It is about presenting the proper content in proper web site. When you have content that can be portable like PDFs, video files, audio files etc. by submitting them to relevant social media sites will surely help your content to travel further, and ultimately get links back to your site which in turn helps to increase your link popularity.


• Encourage the mashup - In today's co-creation world, it pays to be more open about let the others use your content within reason. Syndicating your content with the help of RSS makes it easy for others to create mashups than can drive more traffic to your site or augment your content.