With the introduction of newer Web channels like blogs, social media channels, social bookmarking sites and various social networks, search engines are no longer the only source of valuable traffic to your website.

A good article or a good story on a popular social media site can drive more traffic to your website than a top search engine ranking. All this has created a new process called Social Media Optimization (SMO).

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is the new form of Word of mouth marketing through the use of social bookmarking, social networking and media sharing (video, photo, presentations etc) websites. The prime motive of Social Media Optimization is giving people a cause to visit and connect to your website because of the interesting and unique content.

Social Media Optimization (SMO) is entirely different from Search Engine Optimization (SEO). With Search Engine Optimization you are marketing to the search engines while with Social Media you are marketing directly to your targeted audience. Search Engine Optimization is all about building search rankings on the search engines while SMO is all about building a brand image for your business and lasting relationships with your target audience.

Basic rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

• Increase the likability by adding unique and appealing content that others will want to utilize as a resource.
• Include “Quick Add” links making it easy to del.cio.us, digg, etc.
• Using Permalinks and listing latest connecting blogs on your site gives more visibility to those who link to you.
• Submitting your content to relevant sites will help your content travel more, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
• Participating in different forums and blog commenting helps your message spread faster and further. It helps a lot to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason).

An aggressive and an excellent SMO approach is how intelligent companies gain tactical benefit over their competition. It is the smart social strategies and techniques that help good companies become great companies.

Web Masters often feel frustrated when their SEO efforts don’t deliver the desired results. It is definitely annoying to discover that your SEO efforts after having costing you enough money and time investment have not yielded any fruitful results.

There are Web Masters and companies providing SEO services, who follow SEO practices that are actually based on SEO misconceptions. Prior to heading towards another optimization attempt, it would be beneficial to read about the frequent SEO mistakes that Web masters make so that their SEO efforts are not wasted.

Meta-tags and hidden text

Including the keywords in their meta-tags is standard practice but stopping just at that is a very bad practice. Because if a web master desires to enhance his or her pages’ relevance to search queries, then the keywords should not only be found in the meta-tags but more importantly on the pages themselves. Because it is essential to understand that the keywords in your page’s content which are evident to readers are of more importance than meta-tags.

Sometimes, some Web Masters also incorporate invisible keywords, which the human eye cannot decode, because the text’s color is made to blend in with the background of the web page. Although search engines still see this text so they count towards keyword relevance, but what some web masters don’t realize is that these keyword phrases would have been a lot more valuable as keyword phrase anchor texts had they been visible.

It is essential to understand that hidden texts is a Black Hat SEO strategy for it is in fact a deception to try to fool the search engines to believe that the site is relevant to the query.

Which when caught, could get your site banned from search engines!!!

So beware of such deception and employ only White Hat SEO techniques, even if it takes more effort and time because Search Engines themselves give preference to Slow and Steady Growth. FELIX LABS also believes in white hat SEO because slow and steady wins the race. Using Black Hat SEO techniques there is always risk of getting our website into spam that’s why our experts at FELIX LABS never rely upon Black Hat SEO techniques.