10 Tips To Make Your Site SMO Friendly

Everyone who knows anything about SEO (Search engine optimization) can’t stress enough the importance of trying to increase traffic to your website by ranking well in the search engines. I mean let’s face it if your site isn’t optimized your not going to get very much traffic, and those dreams of getting all the people in the world to visit your site isn’t going to happen. But while SEO is important to your site, there’s something else you should be doing as well and that’s SMO

What’s SMO?

SMO is short for search marketing optimization, like SEO an effective SMO strategy can get your website or blog lots of attention and traffic. The big difference is that SMO focuses on optimizing your content for social interaction, sharing, and discussion rather then search engines. With the popularity of social networking, video sharing sites like YouTube, and Twitter, you need to have an SMO strategy of getting your content to the masses.

So how do you optimize your site for SMO?

So how do you start to tap into SMO to increase traffic to your website or blog? Here is a list of 10 SMO tips you can use on your site to get your site SMO friendly

1. Place your social account icons in a prominent spot

First you should already have accounts set up on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ (if you have been invited to it) to name a few of the hundreds of social sites available online. Once you’ve decided which sites you want to use, cluster them together so they can be easily found. One suggestions I’ve heard is to have them positioned in the top right corner of your website. This will help them stand out from share and follow icons on your site. Personally I don’t think it matters exactly where they are as long as there together and in a spot on your page where people will look.

2. Leverage your sidebar to display social content

Using your sidebar to display social content is an SMO trick that works very well. Using social content widgets provides your users with a quick and simple way to follow you with just a click. Some of types of things your sidebar should have are;

a. Facebook like box

b. Twitter follow me widget

c. Digg Widget

d. YouTube channel subscription

e. Facebook live stream

Remember not to add too many widgets to your sidebar, otherwise your pages load time will go down and that will make people leave faster.

3. Display popular posts

Somewhere on your site you should highlight such things popular articles, recent comments, your Twitter feed, or a poll. These are all good to have because it encourages visitor participation, or at the very least encourage them to visit other pages on your site.

4. Give them a sneak peak

Your goal here whether it’s on a blog or a website is to give your visitors a small peak at the entire article or post. By giving them a small amount this encourages them to click deeper into your site to read the entire post.

5. Use images as thumbnails

Images by there very nature are more eye catching then blocks of text. Use images as thumbnails to encourage visitors to click and visit. The same also applies offsite in places like Google images were those same images provide another link to your site. Remember to also include a keyword in the images alt tag to help rank better.

6. Use display counts

Simply put a display count is how many likes, stumbles, diggs, sphinns, +1’s, and tweets that a particular post gets. These are good to have for a couple reasons.

a. It gives your visitors proof, especially new readers that you know what you’re talking about, that it’s share worthy, and that your content is read.

b. On sites like Digg or Reddit, the number of diggs you get helps determine if your post will be featured on the top page. On Stumbleupon, the more stumbles and thumbs up you get, the more often that content is seen when people stumble.

7. Use eye catching titles

One way to get noticed is to have a title that stands out and grabs attentions. Try to keep your title no longer then 70 characters. To optimize your retweetability try to keep your title heading to about 98 characters or under.

8. End your post with a call to action

At the end of your post encourage your visitors to interact. Add a question such as “What do you think of ______ subject” to encourage people to comment. You can ask them to share your content if they found it useful.

9. Have share buttons below the article

I’ve noticed this on a lot of websites and blogs and it’s a good idea. Your visitors are more likely to share, rate, or bookmark after they’ve read your content then at the beginning. So it only makes sense to include some means of sharing your content with others at the bottom of your page.

10. Display author information

Another way to gain credibility, plus get mentioned in shares or bookmarks is to display some information about yourself. These are also good if you have any guest posts, just don’t use Guest Blogger or Guest Poster as their name.

So there you have it 10 ways you can optimize your site for SMO. Hope these help, if they do please comment and share this post.