My thoughts on social media optimization

Sep 03, 2006

I read Rohit Bhargava’s post — 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO) – a long time back and ever since then I’ve been planning to write on this subject. This topic got me thinking because without coining it, I’ve been thinking about the same thing. There is a client of mine (we’ve turned partners and friends now, sort of) who is always talking about maintaining multiple streams of income and resources. Like him, I too believe we should never depend on one particular resource when it comes to sustaining our lives and businesses. Right now most of us depend a lot on traffic from search engines, particularly Google. Now, I prefer Google over the other search engines, but the guys over there can drop your website from their results the moment they feel like, and there rarely is a redress.

So along with optimizing your website/blog for the major and minor search engines, you should also optimize your content for other websites — the non-search-engine websites and directories; and there are millions of them out their. A lot more effort goes into it, but the results are long-lasting, and more consistent.

But how do you optimize your website for other websites? The point is, they link to your website if they like what you have on your website. It could be anything: