By Matt Jackson (c) 2008

SMO, or Social Media Optimization, helps build website traffic by using social media based websites. The dawning of web 2.0 has seen many different social media websites crop up in an equally large number of different guises. Content sharing, social bookmarking, and collaborative websites form the basis of this initiative and it is these types of websites that you need to use in order to leverage the power of the social web.

SMO as Guerrilla Marketing

I miss the old days….life was simple. Your TV had just a few channels, your phone was attached to a wall, and the computer was a cool thing to have for the few who could afford one. But times change, our world changes and technology grows. TV has 200 plus channels (and still nothing on), your phone is attached to your hip and you could not live without a computer and the Internet is filled with billions of pages.
SEO was an easy job then. It was a no brainer. It was fast, it worked and the stress was little. Well, those days are long gone and the facts of SEO are no longer as easy as it used to be. It is not a quick fix and it is an ongoing process.

Seemingly gone is the company that did one thing and did it well, and tried in earnest not to talk about that one thing done well. Google is dipping into many wells these days, but the biggest change is perhaps how forthcoming Google has been recently.

There was a time when one had to lurk about the search forums and bloggers-familiar-with-the-matter to pick up tidbits about algorithmic changes, policy changes, and future (seemingly grandiose) movements. The Google obsessed are still hard at it – many of them landing new, higher profile gigs or advertising deals – digging through domain registrations, robot droppings, and (sometimes faked) photo evidence. It was this trademark standoffishness that, ironically, seemed to propel the company to juggernaut status.

SMO, or Social Media Optimization, helps build website traffic by using social media based websites. The dawning of web 2.0 has seen many different social media websites crop up in an equally large number of different guises. Content sharing, social bookmarking, and collaborative websites form the basis of this initiative and it is these types of website that you need to use in order to leverage the power of the social web.

SMO As Guerrilla Marketing

Roughly a year ago, local search engine optimization was all the rage - the new frontier in search engine marketing. For a while, it seemed that everyone was interested in the local search angle - even multi-national companies. However, for many companies selling products or services to the entire United States, or even globally, it seemed like a non-starter. Companies that counted on people looking for certain products or services that did not require close proximity to the company’s location were unaffected. As far as local search engine optimization goes, things have changed a bit since then - at least for some.

One webmaster found Google unwilling to index pictures located in an images directory, but some extra content apparently left the site afoul of Google’s guidelines.

Here’s the short version: don’t stick cached content in a directory you want Google to index. Chances are the Googlebot will freak out and run screaming from your server.

Michael VanDeMar wrote at Smackdown how a simple test of indexing images in a subdirectory ended up with Googly accusations of webmaster malfeasance.

Opening a discussion on a Google Groups webmaster help discussion eventually attracted the attention of a Google staffer, John Mueller, who took a peek into VanDeMar’s images subdirectory and found some terrifying creepy-crawlies therein:

Ever since whispers of Web 2.0 started in 2004, rumors have flown fast and furious. Within two weeks of Tim O’Reilly (founder of O’Reilly Media) coining the phrase, there were over 100 guesstimated definitions for Web 2.0. So what is it? Web 2.0 is basically the concept of using the Internet for bigger business purposes than simple Websites. It includes a wide range of areas like shared multi media, social networking, online collaboration and adding the human factor back into the Web.

Primary tools of Web 2.0 include video sharing sites such as YouTube; Wiki sites like Wikipedia; blogs and various “live face” technologies. We’ll cover three of the fastest and easiest ways to optimize for Web 2.0, beginning with blogs.

That’s what I used to ask myself as numerous acquaintances kept tagging me to be part of their realm of contacts in FaceBook.com or LinkedIn.com. It seemed a nuisance until I sat down with an old contact, Don Tinney from EOS Worldside (EOS=Entrepreneurial Operating Systems). Don is an EOS Implementer whose job is quite simple. He says simply, “We make millionaires out of owners of small to medium size companies”. So maybe he has something to say I should know.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) both the bane and boon of many a person’s existence. It’s a known fact that the best way to get traffic to your website is by simply having your site show up in the first page or two of the major search engine’s results. Visitors that come in from those search engine results pages (referred to as SERP) have two main things going for them. They are more likely to buy, and they didn’t cost you any money to get there. Getting your site onto those first two pages can be a struggle, and people are always watching what you are doing and gunning for the top spot. You have to keep aware of all of the latest tactics and methods and measure yourself against your competitors.

Internet marketing has been around for as long as there has been the internet. It really took off, though, once the World Wide Web caught fire in the late 1990’s.

What many people new to internet marketing lose site of, or perhaps didn’t know to begin with, is that internet marketing is based on the fundamental principles of marketing. It just so happens that internet marketers use those principles with a new medium, the web, to reach buyers.

The fundamental principle of marketing is - if you want to sell anything, you need prospective customers.