What is Social Media Optimization(SMO)? How to improve Your SMO?

Online marketing is all about awareness and visibility. Most of the time, people find your small business online in one of three ways:

• Your company comes up early in search engine results,
• You’re mentioned or recommended by another person or website they visit, or
• They already know about your company and go looking for you

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies with the broad goal of bringing more people to your website the first way, by improving your search engine rankings. Social media optimization (SMO) can be one part of SEO—but it also contributes to all three ways people find you online.

SMO is the most important part of Digital marketing.

Why SMO ?

• SMO was originally designed to drive traffic from social media sites such as bookmarking sites and social networks. 
• However, SMO is now significantly more important and not simply because social networking has grown but because SMO also improves SEO performance. 
• Good SMO will drive traffic from both direct social site referrals and from search engines.
• Working with SMO can help you strengthen your brand and boost visibility, as well as generate leads and increase sales.
• Optimizing your social media builds both familiarity with and trust for your business, because consumers will see you not only mentioned, but recommended by others.

As outlined in Wikipedia - 

The core purpose of SMO : SMO is similar to search engine optimization in that the goal is to generate traffic and awareness for a website. 

In general, social media optimization refers to optimizing a website and its content in terms of sharing across social media and networking sites.

Easy & Basics Steps to Improve your SMO

If you want to improve SMO, then I would recommend you the following easy steps which provide a good benchmark against which you can assess and plan your current SMO activity.

1. Reputation 

• Reputation is also about how you engage and support people.
• Undertaking thorough research and producing original content or present quality content. This will make you a respected and qualified source.
• Your reputation will be enhanced if you openly share your content and expertise including content that is not your own, engage with others through discussions and commenting, and if you are friendly and helpful to people.  

2. Engagement 

• Actively engage with your audience. This can include commenting, mentions, shares, likes, and plus ones. 
• No one is as smart as everyone so share other peoples' content and provide a good user experience by providing feedback and comments.
• You need to target the networks with which to interact and make it easy for people to interact. 
• Asking users to create accounts on your site will discourage users from commenting so use existing social logins such as LinkedIn or tools such as Disqus.
• You can also encourage people to engage with a call to action, for example if you find this article helpful please share it. If you think I have missed anything please add your comments below. 

3. Authority 

There are many aspects to authority. 

• Search engines are interested in ascertaining what individuals and brands are seen as authoritative and trusted by real people on the Internet. The most obvious example of a move in this direction is Google Authorship. 
• Setting up Google Authorship can help establish you as an expert and show your profile prominently in search results. 
• You can also enhance your authority and the value of content through social proof. In essence the more your content is shared through plus ones, retweets, bookmarks or likes the more it indicates the value and usefulness of your content. It may also encourage others to read your content. 

4. Leadership 

• To me leadership is about high quality research, thinking and original content production. 
• A leader will research everything they can about their areas and share thoughtful insights which will add value to your audience. Poor quality content will be perceived as such and as a consequence will not be shared.
• As a leader you can also create value for your audience through content curation. This means adding value to content by providing a summary, adding context or a perspective to the content you are sharing. 

5. Social 

• Build high quality networks, quality potentially matters more than quantity. 
• Seek out the experts in your field, read what they say, engage them in debate and share your ideas. 

6. Media platforms

• It is important you focus on the right platforms and communities
• Where does your audience hang out? Find and focus on the platforms, communities and groups where your audience hangs out.
• Some platforms are far more effective in improving the SEO benefits of SMO than others. 

7. Optimization 

I have included below some of my thoughts on the practical and technical aspects of optimizing your SMO below.

• Share buttons - make it easy to share for users by adding share buttons to your content. You should also show the numbers of shares to demonstrate social proof.
• Social Icons - group and display your social icons in a prominent place on your site.
• Subscription options - group together subscription options such as email, RSS, and newsletters.
• Shareable content -  some content is more readily shareable such as infographics or 5 top tips articles. I think this is partly because it is short and scannable. However, I hope and believe longer but well written content will also be shared.
• Social login - use social login options to make it easy for users to comment.
• Rich snippets - social networks pull in rich snippets, data designed to summarise the content of a page. These are very useful for users. The different social networks pull in this data in different  ways. Facebook uses OpenGraph, Twitter uses Twitter Cards and Google Plus will take values from OpenGraph, you just need to set up your authorship profile for your rel="author" tag to work correctly.  If you use WordPress you can use the Yoast plugin to manage and optimise these rich snippets 
• Title tags - Optimize your title tags for sharing, especially on Twitter where there is a character limit and include your name.
• Images - they really do say more than a thousand words. Include images that add value and include an image that can be used as a thumbnail for your content.

I think these are really useful for reviewing your approach to integrating social media marketing into a website.

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What is SEO? What is its importance? Why there is need to learn about SEO?

You are might be confuse by number of questions. I will answer your each and every questions that bothering your mind.

First of all, what is the abbreviation of SEO? You must know about it. It is the part of Digital Marketing.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. 

Now what is Search Engine?

Technically speaking search engine is a computer program that retrieves documents or files or data from a database or from a computer network. I think you are bit confusing about this technically language. Simply, search engine the engine where you type something what you are looking for and you get relevant result according to your query that you have typed in engine.

Let us take an example, you want information about a computer. Then you will type what is computer, or what are kinds of software in computer. After the query whatever you typed, relevant will come at an instant.

Examples of Search Engine : Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com, and more search engines.

What are some types of Search Engine :

The basic types of search engines include - Web crawlers, meta, directories and hybrids.

1) Web Crawlers : Crawlers, or spiders, are the most common type of search engine. Crawlers are user friendly and produce a large number of results. These can be manipulated with search engine optimization, a ranking system used to organize search results. Filtering through the huge number of search results can be difficult for inexperienced users looking for specific information. Examples of crawlers are Google and Bing.

2) Meta Engines : Meta engines search multiple search engines at the same time to get a composite list, and includes engines like Dogpile. 

3) Directories : Directories are run by humans instead of bots and programs. Human editors review each page or item submitted to be included to ensure that the results are relevant and high quality. Examples of directories include Open Directory Project and LookSmart. 

4) Hybrids : Hybrids are a combination of crawlers and directories that either give you a choice between the two result groups or mix the groups together. Some hybrids include Yahoo Directories and MSN Search.

These all are about search engine. Now question is arising that how search engine works? I will tell you about this in another section. 

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is the part of internet marketing. It is the technique or process via this we can improve website visibility in major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing etc.

Types of SEO - 

1. On Page Optimization

2. Off Page Optimization

What is On-Page Optimization?

On page optimization is very important part of SEO & play a vital role in the improvement of SERP (Search Engine Result Page).  We can whatever changes made by us in coding or internal part of our webpage call on page for instance content adding, meta tag placing, meta description, image alt tag etc.

What is Off-Page Optimization?

We can say on page is the soul than its body without off page its quite difficult to get higher position in search engines for competitive keywords. In a simple language we can say off page optimization don’t allow you to make any changes in the website. It’s the process of building quality links, forum discussion, article, directory, bookmarking etc to boost the rank of your website.

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Digital Marketing - What is it and why there is need to adopt it?

Are you in confusion about Digital Marketing? What is it and why is it demanding now these days?

Firstly I will clarify you about this term. As you know "Digital" describes electronic technology that generates, stores, and processes data in terms of two states: positive and non-positive. 

Now the another word is "Marketing". The management process through which goods and services move from concept to the customer.

For example, new Apple products are developed to include improved applications and systems, are set at different prices depending on how much capability the customer desires, and are sold in places where other Apple products are sold. In order to promote the device, the company featured its debut at tech events and is highly advertised on the web and on television.

Marketing is based on thinking about the business in terms of customer needs and their satisfaction. Marketing differs from selling because "Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs." 

In other words, marketing has less to do with getting customers to pay for your product as it does developing a demand for that product and fulfilling the customer's needs.

So, Digital marketing is marketing that makes use of electronic devices (computers) such as personal computers, smartphones, cellphones, tablets and game consoles to engage with stakeholders. Digital marketing applies technologies or platforms such as websites, e-mail, apps (classic and mobile) and social networks. Digital Marketing can be through Non-internet channels like TV, Radio, SMS, etc or through Internet channels like Social Media, E-mails ads, Banner ads, etc. Social Media Marketing is a component of digital marketing. Many organizations use a combination of traditional and digital marketing channels; however, digital marketing is becoming more popular with marketers as it allows them to track their Return on Investment (ROI) more accurately compared to other traditional marketing channels.

Why there is need to adopt digital marketing strategies?

In a digital age, where most users have computers and mobile devices, accessing websites, social networks, and other online media, has become part of day-to-day living. Thus, many companies have adopted digital marketing strategies to continue to promote their products and services to these users via these channels.

According to global statistics (by the World Bank), more than 2 million people have Internet access today, out of which 70 percent uses it daily. It is for this reason that companies are investing an average of 12 percent to 20 percent of their annual income on digital marketing.

Digital marketing is on a continuous growth path thanks to the ever growing number of always-online users - mostly due to the explosive growth in the mobile space. It is important for marketers to evaluate different strategies in seeking out where to invest their marketing budget to get the best results and increase conversions.

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