Being Social to get tar­geted web traffic

. By now, you would have already com­mit­ted to heart the SEO Fun­da­men­tals Steps:

3. Links
4. Social.

What is Social Media Opti­miza­tion (SMO)

What is Social Media Opti­miza­tion or SMO? It’s a term coined by Rohit Bhar­gava. Accord­ing to him, the con­cept behind SMO is sim­ple: to make a site so that its con­tents are eas­ily linked to or shared.

Basi­cally SMO steps are:

• Increase your linkability,
• Make tag­ging and book­mark­ing easy,
• Reward engage­ment,
• Proac­tively share con­tent, and
• Encour­age the mashup.

How to imple­ment SMO

Build­ing a Social Media Community

It looks like a lot of work. In real­ity, it’s not that dif­fi­cult. The steps over­lap each other.

If your site is a Word­Press blog (self-hosted), it’s so easy to imple­ment SMO. There are lots of plu­gin to do the job.

For me I use Social­Share plu­gin. You can see it in action above.

The one with the label “Shar­ing is sexy”. I’ve also use the Apture bar for Face­book and Twitter.

In Face­book, I have Face­book Page for this blog. I use Word­Booker Plu­gin to auto­mat­i­cally update my Face­book Page when­ever I post an arti­cle here. The post will also be tweeted auto­mat­i­cally via Twit­ter Tools plu­gin.

In fact even those hosted blogs makes it easy to imple­ment social media.

From Blog­ger to Pos­ter­ous to Tum­blr, all this blog­ging sites have built-in social share but­tons. You can share your con­tent eas­ily to Face­book and Twitter.

Even Face­book makes it easy to do it. It has a RSS import func­tion.

If you look around at most web­pages today, they have a so-called “Share” but­ton. So you can tweet it, post it to Face­book, Digg it or Stum­ble­Upon or sim­ply make it Deli­cious. This is take advan­tage of the social media effect.

It comes back to the most fun­da­men­tal question:

Why would your read­ers want to share your content?

Sim­ply because your con­tent is enter­tain­ing, edu­ca­tional and infor­ma­tive.

Do Search Engines pay atten­tion to Social Media

Search engines will always try to be rel­e­vant. They want their users to use their ser­vices to search the social sphere.

Yes, search engine does pay atten­tion to social media. This arti­cle shows how clearly social media influ­ences search engine results.

My Thoughts on SEO

Think­ing

The one thing that you have to remem­ber about hav­ing a site or blog is not for the robot crawlers.

It’s for your human readers.

Don’t worry too much about opti­miz­ing your site. What you need to do is write con­tent that your read­ers would like to read.

Do it as much as you can and as often as you can.

When I started this blog, some­where in May 2010, I didn’t bother about opti­miza­tion. Really didn’t bother.

I just sim­ply wrote what I like. Over time, the blog grew nat­u­rally. From just one fan (that’s me) to now about 290 on Face­book and 584 on Twitter.

Yes, along the way I made mistakes.That’s how you learn. Did you fall a cou­ple of times before rid­ing that bike?

Just write about top­ics with a spe­cific focus that are enter­tain­ing, edu­ca­tional and infor­ma­tive and read­ers will nat­u­rally share your content.

And don’t for­get to sub­scribe below, or Like my Face­book Page or fol­low me on Twit­ter, so that you’ll always be in the loop.

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