Are You Bookmarking? A Beginner's Guide To SMO

A lot has been made of the transition of the Internet to Web 2.0. Social networking and community based websites are deemed as being the next step in Internet use and web usage statistics tend to agree. More and more of us are bookmarking websites and publishing lists of the sites we find useful. At the same time we are also turning our attention to blogs, video and image sharing, and general community portal sites. Even the search engines are getting in on the act by creating universal search portals that list all of these different varieties of new media. The question is, how can the Internet marketer or website owner take advantage?

Web 2.0 And Social Networking

The concept behind web 2.0 is online social interaction. Blogs and social sites like MySpace and FaceBook have paved the way in this sense. Static, information packed sites are being turned down in favour of websites that offer more. Blogs have become popular because they offer social interaction. Social bookmarking and web tagging have also become popular because they provide a method of browsing other people's likes and dislikes – social interaction at its finest.

Social Media Websites

Social bookmarking and submission sites are entirely human edited. Tagging enables users to add content with their own specified keywords. Search engine spiders, in contrast, use keyword density and algorithmic semantic indexing to determine the topic of a site. Human edited tags are infinitely more reliable than software edited ones.

Building Your Bookmarks

As people bookmark sites, pages, and articles that they find useful, the more beneficial pieces gain more exposure. This form of ranking is entirely human edited and based solely on what people think of the contribution. In comparison, search engines rely on algorithmic interpretations of a website to determine its topic and count the number and value of incoming links to determine its popularity and worthiness. As a side note, certain search engines give a lot of weight to social links. Yahoo, in particular, are known to rank links from blogs and other social sites particularly highly.

Human Edited Directories

Social bookmarking offers the surfer a directory of pages, sites, and other media based on certain tags, or keywords. Because these directories are edited entirely by humans, they are usually more reliable than their spider indexed counterparts. This has led to a marketing technique, known as Social Media Optimisation or SMO, to take advantage of the social bookmarking scene. Many active members of the communities frown on this behaviour but as long as you actively participate rather than spam the indexes it does offer a genuine source of traffic.

Link Bait Or High Quality Content?

The key importance in SMO is to provide valuable and useful content on your pages. The term link bait has been coined to mean the publishing of any content that drives others to link to it. In practice, it's just common sense to provide content of this quality. As well as providing high quality content, you should add social bookmarking buttons to the relevant pages of your site. These enable your visitors to bookmark your pages for you.

Be Active

Be active within the social networking scene. Promoting one or two of your own pages is acceptable if they are high quality pages. Bookmark sites and pages, other than your own, that you genuinely feel are useful. Include the page or pages of your own that you want to promote and publish your bookmark list. Most bookmarking sites allow users to decide whether to make a bookmark list private or public – always choose public.

SMO To Promote Your Site

SMO, or Social Media Optimisation, is the act of promoting pages or web content in social networking and bookmarking sites. These sites are collectively a major part of the web 2.0 phenomenon and can produce large amounts of active and targeted traffic in a relatively short space of time. Bookmarking your own pages is frowned upon if you do it too often, or bookmark pages that are not of a high quality. However, some strategic bookmarking of the more relevant and beneficial content on your site will help to increase your links and grow your traffic base.