So, Social Media Optimization. What's this all about? Well, I personally think that it is a very good derivitive of the whole SEO subject. It is by definition, a method of gererating publicity through online PR with a focus on social networking, social media and online community building. It is an essential part of the mix. By doing 'SMO' you are adding another dimension to your online visibility. It allows for traffic to driven to your site through another avenue other than search engines.

SMO can be quite a varied task. There's a lot of options available! Generating publicity can be done in lots of places in many ways. RSS feeds, blogging, using Flickr and YouTube, social media sites and social networking sites can all be used to communicate your message.

SMO is definitely something to pay credence too. Just as SEO is now an imperitive skill, spending time on devleloping a social media strategy is of great importance. The possibilities are endless. More to the point though, it's more fun. Playing around in the communities is quite an enjoyable way of doing marketing. Essentially we all spend our time looking at, reading and watching content within these communities anyway, so we may as well be tweaking little bits here and there for the greater good of our own sites.

Anchor text and keyword research is so important if you want your links to gain respect and trust in the relevance rankings. Using the correct anchor text is the simplest thing you can do in terms of giving your links the best possible chance.

A simple link may have some benefit, but coupled with the right anchor text it is far more powerful. Google and the other SEs are looking to match things up, add things together and group similar things as much as they can. Their algorithms are mathematical and as such they want everything to be just so. By using the right anchor text, with the right links, with the right keywords, on the right page, in the right place, you are making everything very easy for the search engine. It's all there to see. The SE doesn't have to search around on the ground in the dark, with a torch; instead it gets broad daylight and some nice little arrows pointing to where everything is. The moral of this story is: make everything as simple as possible for the search engine. If you create hard work for it, you stand more chance of it getting bored and moving on somewhere else.

One of the most important factors of successful Online PR is relevance. As soon as someone spots a relevancy inaccuracy in your site or information you publish you will instantly find yourself in trouble. The more relevant you are to what your target audience want to see, the better.

Relevance is sometimes ambiguous and it does seem like a very simple thing to get right. However, many people and companies think they are being entirely relevant, but they are only thinking of relevance in terms of it being relevant to them. You may know something about your industry and think of something that is entirely relevant to your own knowledge, but the person you want to communicate a message to may never have thought of that as being relevant and may not understand where the connection comes in. Then they will think that the message isn't relevant to them, they won't distribute it freely and they won't do any of the work you want them to do!

I've been to pubcon ! hooray ! that to the layperson is a 3 day 'geekfest' search marketing conference held in Las Vegas between the 4th and 7th of December 2007.

The session most relevant you (Online PR person) was:

Reputation Monitoring and Management
If you are not talking with your customer base your customer base will be talking about you. This session will look at ways to monitor, manage, and influence your reputation within the blogosphere and press.

I won't go into all the specifics, but the must useful points were:

• Use the right tools to monitor what is being said about you.

• When something flares up (like a disgruntled customer ranting about you) get in there and do some serious damage limitation.
  

• When you want to spread a message, find the 'hub' sites and help them write about your product or service. Then if all goes well, these sites disseminate a story across the blogosphere and consequently your originating site will be ranked on the search engines.
  

The right tools.....

I've been working on some international search engine projects i.e. getting various sites across different languages and I found a very helpful set of guidelines from the Google's Matt Cutts.

The main point is that you can roll the duplicate content out across different countries (provided you jump through a few hoops) which obviously will save you on content provision costs.

Personally I'm not really into submitting content to PR websites because I don't really believe many people actually read them. I'm sure there are many arguments against this, but if I want the authority opinion on a given subject, I'll either go to google or some of my favourite blogs or forums.

Still, if you are really working hard to get the word out, then this list my interest you...

It's very important to have a clear set of goals and targets, whether it's

- ranking for a particular keyword
 
- getting in web traffic focusing on a particular interest

- achieving conversions (i.e. selling things)

When you look around the online PR space, you see lots of talk about social networks, blogs, meme building - but not a whole lot on the combination of PR and deliverables...

Having spent some time cruising the blogosphere for other online PR sites, it's clear there is a disconnect between traditional PR people and online PR people.

The disconnect seems to be:
- No real understanding of the multiple routes to end users
- Failure to understand the utility of the internet i.e. users want immediacy
- No sense of 'internet is a conversation'
- Hanging on to the idea that broadcast messaging is somehow going to work in the internet.
- And (for me) most importantly Online PR as a way to get ranked on search engines.

"Will it blend?" : Online PR case Study

If you watch YouTube, you may have seen the video of a middle aged American promoting a blender from Blendtech. In case you hav'nt seen it...

This video has been seen 1.8 million times and was one the great 'memes' of the internet back in July 07. This Google trends graph shows how the phrase 'will it blend' has suddenly got popular.

Wikipedia does not actually have a page for 'online PR ' - which is interesting. It seems to lump it in with PR/Public relaitons, which I think is wrong.

Why? Because if the definition of PR is "a promotion intended to create goodwill for a person or institutions image.", then this wholly applies to search engine optimsation and promoting ideas and events to the myriad of internet properties out there. 

Read on for what you can do to be seen online...