Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, adding a “Digg This” button, blogging and incorporating third party community functionalities like Flickr photo slides and galleries, Facebook and LinkedIn Ad Pages or YouTube videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines.

Objective of a SMO Campaign: SMO or Social Media Optimization is required to achieve high visibility and driving traffic to your website. Mostly dynamic contents are optimized on Social Networking Web sites like Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo, Youtube, Flickr, Twitter, Slideshow, IndiaCityPages.com, etc. Some important SMO elements are:

A) Brand Building: You want your website to be popular among Social media users, The idea is there is lot of people using Social networks, Social Media sites. How do you become popular among the users?
B) Reputation Management: To attain leadership in industry. You participate in forums, answers program to build an image of your company.
C) Networking with people in the same industry or related industry again for brand building and reputation management.
D) Building Back-links and Traffic: Social media optimization’s biggest benefit is backlinks and traffic. Traffic directly from social media sites and traffic search engines due to backlinks from social media sites.

Blog Writing and Promotion on directories such as technorati, blogcatalog, feedburner, blogarama and zimbio. Blog optimization with self hosted wordpress or drupal blog installation, Blog SEO, adding tools in blog for optimizing it for social media. Social Bookmarking tools on your website and tag optimization for del.icio.us, reddit, digg, frank, Netvouz, furl, blinklist, technorati and other social bookmarking portals. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to provide an effective way to distribute the dynamic content of your website. Optimize the RSS content as well as submission to various RSS web sites.

Standard SMO Service Plans involve following activities:
# Preliminary Consultation, Analysis and Reporting.
# Placement in Popular Social Media Portals and Blogs.
# Competitive Analysis Report Meta tag optimization & SEO.
# Keyword identification and search terms analysis.
# Targeted, optimized pages for Search engines destined as landing pages for visitors.
# Manual submissions to top search engines and directories
# Link development and Management services to increase your link popularity and rankings.
# Monthly reports showing results and progress.
# Blogging, RSS Feeds and Press Release Submissions.

We ask for a one-time fee and regular maintenance fees depending on extent and type of your target market. While SEO and PPC can really offer linear growth in user traffic, SMO can have Snowball effect and exponential traffic growth.