Social Media Optimization…The Next Level

SMO (Social Media Optimization) is next step in the Search engine optimization in era of Web 2.0. Whereas SEO is the process to optimize the website for search engine software i.e. crawlers, the SMO is the process of optimizing the website for the human readers.

In detailed, SEO involves most searched keywords to your website and then increase the inbound links by promoting those keywords over various platforms by various techniques, so that when crawleror spider comes to your site it would give your web page higher rank based on relative importance of the content, major parameters being the key words and the quality of inbound links.

As a result if the content in your website is not offering something unique, it can rank in top ten over search engine results if your website is:

• Easy for search engines to find and navigate through.
• Has got important websites linked to you.
• Has popular, most searched about keywords incorporated at proper places.

Does the SEO job finish here? Answer is NO!

The content and the services presented must be compel enough to have the visitor converted into buyer of that service.

But SMO is a different than SEO. In words of SMO pioneer Rohit Bhargava

“The idea or you may say 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, and more frequently integrated in appropriate posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

The most important word is social media.

Social media as defined in Wikipedia is:

“Social media describes the online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves.

Social media can have many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. The social media sites typically use tools like message boards, forums, podcasts, bookmarks, communities, weblogs, wikis etc.”

This means to promote your website in social media, people read them and create a buzz about it, in other words you have to promot your site through word of mouth in true web 2.0 fashion. You can almost make the case that if a site relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.” Therefore if you want to succeed in web 2.0 era you have to opt for SMO.

This can happen only when your website provides something that is unique and compelling enough for the people over social media to tell their friends about. Once that happens people from relevant forums, blogs and communities will start flocking in, they would start bookmarking your site. If that happens the SEO part will take care of itself, as both quality and quantity of the inbound links will be great.

Easy enough to write about it, right! But the million bucks question is, how to do it?

The pioneers of SMO have written down some rules, I will discuss those rules through the lenses of my own understanding and expertise in the area in my next posting before actually getting down to the business of explaining the doing part of SMO.

Yahoo launches ‘yahoo Clues’

Yahoo took a step into the Internet trends space. Yahoo launches ‘yahoo Clues’ to rival Google trends. With Yahoo Clues, you can discover and compare trending information for search terms. Yahoo Clues gives you insight into the types of people searching for specific keyword phrases and shows related terms based on those searches. The default view will display results for the last 30 days, but it can be changed to the week or day. In Yahoo Clues you can see search volume charts, demographic graphs, maps, or even related searches specific to a demographic group

In Yahoo Clues Following information is available:

• Searches Over Time: This chart provides search volume trends
• Demographic: This section provides a demographic breakdown of Age and Gender.
• By Income
• By Location: This graph shows from where the maximum searches originated. Currently it shows the information originated from united State.
• Search Flow: Provides the list of most probable previous and next user searches.
• Related Search: most common related search terms across Yahoo!

You find the search box on your left hand side, place your key term over there and yahoo will display the comparison chart.

Blogging Tips For Business

Choose the most appropriate name:

"You name defines you and highlights who you are." This is not just a statement but to some extent a core truth. Hence, it is better to choose the name that speaks more of you as a person. A name that sounds more of you or highlights your personality in a way should be your take. So, while naming your blog, you need to do some serious thinking.

Use RSS feeds:

Syndication is an important way to get connected with the right people. RSS feeds directly inform people about your newer activity on your blog via a faster running browser. All you have to do is to add the "subscribe to RSS feed" code into your blog page and interested people will start getting your updates when you update your blog.

Link your blog:

For most blog owners, the concept of blogging is a standalone option to assure their services. However, it is not always a trustworthy option. The best thing would be to promote the link of the website.

Choose an affiliate program:

If you want your blogs to reach new heights, you need to choose an efficient and successful affiliate program that actually works in a real time. If you go over boarded with these advertisements, it would be a real disastrous situation for you.

Implement video on your blogs:

Visuals certainly attract. You need to put some great and attractive videos that look actually nice and says a thousand lines for your need.

Myth About Meta Tags

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It is a regular myth that if you use meta tags in your site, you are guaranteed to be in the top ranking, but this is not true at all. Meta tags do not guarantee anything, but they may help. Since all search engines work in a different way from each other, it is always wise to try everything and anything at least once.

Page Rank

PageRank (PR) is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page which is used by the Google search engine that assigns a mathematical weighting to each element with the purpose of measuring its comparative value within the set.

Every page in the Google database is assigned a "PR" number, which can be in between 0 - 10. The higher the value, the better ranked the page is. In order to receive a higher pagerank, you must receive more links to your site from other websites which is related to your website themes. The higher the PR, the better prospective the site ranks better.

When a website has PageRank of 0, the site is said to be "PR0".

How can I optimize my site on a small budget?

Can my blogroll affect my blog's reputation in Google?

Microsites and SEO

The subject of microsites (smaller sites operating in the same market under the same owner that are used either in place of or to support a single bigger site) comes up a lot in SEO conversation. I have recently been talking about this to some prospects, so I have decided to write up my thoughts on the matter. It's surprising how beginners are forever tempted to reinvent SEO, and how consistently they revert to ideas that are about a decade old. Creating microsites liberally to target individual keywords is a very common practice among SEO novices and amateurs.

Why it's a bad idea
People usually create microsites for the following misguided reasons:
• With many KID (keyword-in-domain) sites I can target multiple keywords.
• I will cleverly interlink my sites; this will give me some link power.
• I will put my quality content on a separate authority site which will get a lot of links, and then I will link that domain to my commercial site to get it to rank for my keywords.
• Microsites are more focused thematically, so it is easier to rank them for the relevant terms.
• Many directories don't support "deep links" into a single site, but I can link to my multiple home pages from the same directory

(Have I missed your reason? Please let me know what it is and let's consider it separately.)

None of the above are compelling, and most are based on a very old understanding (think Google's original PageRank algorithm). You may get temporary ranking boosts by running microsites, but don’t get your hopes up that the effects will last: they will go away once your rankings are fully evaluated.

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How to Rank Highly in the Search Engines

Access to your website is primarily through the search engines. Therefore, your site needs to be found by the top search engines such as Yahoo and Google. These search engines can be your best ally in generating internet traffic. As well as leading to more sales, it provides free advertising of your business or service.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the technique of making your website rank highly n search engine databases according to the relevance to the user’s search. To be successful in the search engines, you need to have articles and keywords based on the words that users look for on the search engines.

It is important to submit your site to the main search engines. When you do this, you need to use optimised keywords to increase your ranking. This is particularly so in a highly competitive industry. By doing so, you will attract more potential buyers to your site.

When optimising your website, it pays to bear in mind that text is what the search engines take notice of, not graphics. It is therefore imperative that you have good written content on your site.

A good investment if you’re serious about search engine optimisation is software that helps you determine the most searched for keywords in your industry. This will let you focus on optimising your website with the most relevant keywords.

Another area of focus is the text on your home page as this is the first thing search engines read. In the opening paragraph, use as many keywords and key phrases as possible. Also, your website ranking will be better if your HTML tags are consistent with your text.

Do some research to find the right search engine for your business needs but certainly don’t overlook the big three, which is Google, Yahoo, and MSN. These will be crucial to your marketing efforts.

When submitting your website to search engines, consider these important things:

1. Does the search engine generator give updates?
2. Does the registration process let you include your purpose?

To give more chance of potential customers finding you easily, you should register your website with as many search engines as you can.

Search engines use a program called a spider that browses the internet and looks for web pages that have been visited. If you overuse keywords, this spider may bypass your site and it won’t be included in search results. It is known as keyword abuse so it is important to get the balance right.

Some websites also don’t use their listed keywords in their content and therefore the spider doesn’t acknowledge it. This means your web page won’t be indexed. It is therefore a waste of your time coming up with lots of irrelevant keywords just to have your website overlooked by the search engines. Remember, keep it relevant to what your site is about.

One of the main objectives for your online business is building up a database of customers and potential customers. If your website delivers on its promises, you will begine to get repeat customers which are the backbone of your business. To do this well, you need to communicate with these customers and potential customers using some or all of the following:

• Affiliate programs
• Newsletters
• Banner ads
• Discussion groups and forums

Your data should consist of information collected through previous sales, customer communications and email lists. There are several sources of useful and relevant data to build a successful customer database including:

• customer order forms
• warranty card information
• servicing information
• records of returned products
• questionnaires filled out at time of purchase

Use this information to ascertain what it is that your customers want to see and hear. After getting to know as much as possible about these customers and potential customers, you can correspond with them much more effectively.

Long Trail Keyword Search

The long trail of search is a concept created by Chris Anderson, an editor at Wired magazine. It defines the non competitive keywords usually three to five word phrases that site visitors use to find websites. The idea of non competitive keywords and phrases related to more specific terms that you can use to describe your products or information. The concept of long trail of search is that you begin any search with a very brand term. For example if you are searching for Italian dinner recipies, that term is broad enough to return for too many results to be useful.

Using the long trail theory, however, the more precise and less common keywords and phrases are usually the most effective. These are located at the end of the “trail” and are represented by a very small tips (as if on the end of a tail).

Normally, a product site gets visitors by several types of keywords and phrases:

* Product names and brads
* General keywords and phrases
* Long trail keywords and phrases

On Page Factors - Search Engine Optimization

When we talk about search engine optimization we are in actuality discussing how to set our web pages so that the Google bot will become aware of them and index them well. As seen as we recognize we have to set things up for Google on our pages there are some things that need to be clear.

Hilltop is an algorithm created 10 years ago that determines the relevance and importance of a specific web page (distinguishes between expert and authority pages). Expert pages are those pages which have a lot of out bound link. The authority pages have the links pointing at them as they or provide the distinctive information.


The Sandbox is a term used for one of Google’s to observe the ranking of web pages so called filters. It relates to new sites that have only just been indexed. When your new site enters the sandbox it will no longer be indexed by google and may keep on that way for 6 to 12 months. However not every new site goes through the sandbox and it is simply assumption that it exists.

Ok now let’s talk about some on page SEO factors that you are going to need to put into practice in order to optimize your site. One thing that I must bring up directly is the false principle that Meta tags for descriptions and keywords are going to help in your fight for relevancy. They will help users looking for your site and help search engines describe it correctly but will do nothing for your rank or index result.

Some things that are important for any search engine optimizer are keywords in the domain name, title tags, and content. You may also want to include 3 to 5 outbound links to sites with similar content, this will help in establishing your site as an authority site. Another thing to do to improve any search engine optimization campaign is to bold any keyword text inside your content.

It is good quality practice to select around 50 keywords for your site and to dedicate a page to each one of them ensure each page follows the above rules. Also make sure to build links to each page independently ensuring the relevant anchor test is used.

Search engine optimization is a gigantic subject and one that can take years to fully master, you have to be patient and steady if you really want your efforts to pay off.