What is Social Media Optimization?

Social Media Optimization

When you understand what social media are, it’s not a far step from there to social-media optimization. It’s about using social media to spread the news about your web site. And instead of tweaking the elements of your web site, when you’re practicing social-media optimization you’re participating in social networks and tweaking the content that you share within those networks.


It’s through that participation and optimization that your site is distributed, and that’s what brings traffic to your web site. There are also a couple of added benefits to social-media optimization. First, it’s free in terms of monetary investment. There is no cost to participate in these networks except your time. But make no mistake about it, you will have to invest a chunk of front-end time into this type of optimization. You must become familiar with the communities and participate to establish a name for yourself before anyone will take serious notice of you.

The other benefit of social-media optimization is that it’s really a viral marketing strategy. Nearly everyone is familiar with a virus. It’s that nasty little bug that multiplies exponentially and makes you believe death would be an improvement. Viral marketing is neat, not nasty, but it works in a somewhat similar way.

When you can tap viral marketing for your online presence, word of your brand spreads like a virus — it moves faster and faster as the buzz increases, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to stop it. And that’s good. If your marketing message has become viral, you can expect to see some serious growth in the number of visitors to your site and by extension to the number of goal conversions that you see.

Viral marketing is a good thing. And when you’ve optimized your social-media participating, you can almost guarantee that your marketing will soon have that viral quality that you’re looking for.

Source : Search Engine Optimization Bible by Wiley

What is SEO Spam?

What Constitutes SEO Spam?

So, if SEO spam is so hard to define, how do you know whether what you’re doing is right or wrong?

Good question. And the answer is that you don’t always know, but there are some guidelines that you can follow that will help you stay out of the spam category. Basic, good web-design practices are your best defense. If you’re handling your web-site search marketing using the guidelines provided by the various search engines you’ll target, you should be in a position not to worry about being classified as a spammer.

Don’t do anything that makes you worry that you’re doing wrong.
It sounds like simple advice, but when you think about it, if you’re doing something on your web site that you have to worry is going to get you banned from a search engine, you probably shouldn’t do it. This includes strategies like using hidden text on your web pages, using doorway pages or cloaking your pages, and creating false link structures. Even if you don’t know that these strategies are banned by search engines, when you consider the sneakiness of the strategy, you’ll be able to tell that it’s not likely a strategy that you should use.

Don’t make your web site appear to be something that it’s not.
It’s easy to “put a spin” on something to make it appear more attractive than it really is. People do it all the time where products and services are concerned. But using that same strategy on your web site may get you banned. Creating false link structures is one way you might make your site appear more popular than it really is. The problem with using that strategy is that it won’t take a crawler long to figure out that all of those sites are interconnected.

Don’t trust someone who says that a certain practice is acceptable, if you even suspect that it’s not.
Some unethical SEO people will tell you that it’s okay if you use certain obvious spam techniques as long as you use them correctly. Wrong. Spam is spam. It doesn’t matter how you use it, the search crawler will still see it as spam and you’ll still pay the consequences, while the unethical SEO consultant will take the money and leave you in the crawler’s bad graces.

Source : Search Engine Optimization Bible by Wiley