SMO, or Social Media Optimization, is one of the latest Internet marketing strategies. Social media websites have become vastly popular, with the dawn of Web 2.0 being seen as the dawn of the social Internet. Static websites that are rarely updated are becoming less desirable and, in their place, websites that offer user interaction of some description are becoming the more popular destination for the world’s surfers. Effective SMO contains a number of elements that are often associated with other forms of online marketing. Link building and viral marketing are a big part of SMO but still only a portion.

Linkable Content Persuading others to link to you or bookmark you as a resource means providing linkable content. While interactive web developments certainly create a buzz and make it very easy for others to link to, anything fresh, unique, innovative, and even controversial will help you build links. Reports, ebooks, and white papers are still popular offerings that other social sites and surfers will reference.

Offer The Right Tools At the most basic level, an SMO campaign requires the addition of tagging buttons to linkable content. This ensures that you can use your visitors to promote your site because you are offering a way to do so in just a single or very few clicks. Also offer code for text links (this also allows you to have some control of the anchor text used) and other social media buttons and options.

Make It Viral In some respects, SMO can be considered a form of viral marketing. The intention is to get your website or blog seen by other surfers who will, in turn, relay the details of your site to others, and so on. The more appealing your content and the more of a reaction it invokes, the more people will naturally hear about it but will often be down to you to start the ball rolling. Submit your content or bookmark your pages yourself, if they provide something genuinely useful or valuable to surfers.

Use Buttons Rather Than Text Links Graphical buttons have proven to be more effective than static text links. In the same way that we suffer from advertising blindness we are beginning to ignore generic text links that appear at the foot of a page. We know these to be links and, with poor formatting, they can be difficult to spot at the best of times. A graphic button placed in a prominent and relevant position is more likely to provide the results you want.

Using An Effective CTA Button Always ensure that content is relevant, especially your CTA. If visitors on a page are being led to navigate to a product information page, then the CTA button should lead them to that page. Conversely, if they have been sold on a product or service and are ready to make the purchase or begin the purchasing process in earnest then the CTA button should help them do exactly that. Buttons using relevant, concise, and accurate text typically prove more effective than generic, long-winded text links.