By: Deepti Jain

Search engine optimization is the practise of optimising a website for reasons of attracting targeted search engine traffic, breaking down crawling barriers to help the search engines fully index your site, Social Media Optimization on the other hand is about knocking down site walls so content can be easily found, distributed and shared by the community. This process may simply mean embedding a “Digg This” button on your site blog or it may mean spending hours to create a piece of compelling content, that could either drive thousands of visitors to your site or have no effect at all.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the process of optimising a website so that its content can be easily spread on the Net by the website’s own visitors to off-site social and online communities - basically making it “socially friendly”. The most common example is adding social bookmarks, trackbacks and widgets to a site’s page, such as “add to del.ici.ous” links and the MyBlogLog widget.

Apart from the Search Engines, you can also get additional traffic from various other channels through SMO strategies! Your website’s popularity gets increased!

You can have a better understanding on what’s the trend, what your customers actually needs from you, when you interact with your customers, their feedbacks, thus on improving your services/products thereby improving the ROI (return on investment) through social media sites like Myspace.

It inspires you to create excellent, keyword-rich content, which in turn can help build your online and offline brand, increase quality inbound links over time, make you a subject matter expert, and expose your content to thousands of new visitors.

SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren’t the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. The result is more visibility, more exposure, inbound links and increase in targeted traffic.

Once you know your goals you can start deciding which sites are best geared towards helping you meet them. Right now the three sites that seem to be driving the most traffic are Digg, StumbleUpon and del.icio.us. Social Media sites encourage forward thinking, sharing information and networking all at the same time.

Here is a very short list of some of the most popular sites for social media optimization:

•Digg: Digg is a user-driven content site where members can vote, bury and comment on stories submitted by other members. Getting onto Digg’s front page often results in thousands of visitors flocking to your site and can have lasting ranking effects.

•Del.icio.us: Del.icio.us is a Yahoo-owned social bookmarking site. Del.icio.us allows members to publicly save bookmarks using tags. Don’t be afraid to tag your own content.

•YouTube: Well-known video upload site. Recently acquired by Google, so look for YouTube videos to start appearing in Google’s index.

•Newsvine: Another social news site where members can submit news stories, comment on other popular stories, create connections with regular users.

•StumbleUpon: StumbleUpon acts as a discovery/recommendation engine and match users with Web sites, videos, images, etc. based on their interests that they may have been previously unaware of.

Joe Whyte on webpronews has quality list of more social media sites that incorporate a sense of socialness to them. Have a look!

Spread the word: Social Media Optimization