Social Media Optimization is the latest development in the field of online marketing. From hindsight SMO seems like an inevitable result of the rapid growth of social sites on the net as well as the recent bursts in popularity of     Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing but it differs from them in many ways. SEO as the term suggests involves more publicity on the organic searches of the various search engines but SMO involves more publicity on all the other sources.

Let us breakdown what SMO actually means. This requires us to understand what social media is. Social media is different from traditional media in the sense that it is much more interactive basically involving open discussions and dialogues about the relevant content which in turn can be anything and everything. Social media includes all the various social networking sites, internet forums, articles and blogs as well as audio/video sharing. So now SMO can be taken to be an optimizing method involving such online communities.

The main aim of SMO is to promote the mentioned forums. But this does not mean blatant and mindless plugging. This process must be done very intelligently but don’t get scared off, anybody can do it.

If I put it in one line all then you have to alter your content so as to make it more promotion friendly. You want to be more noticeable on the internet as a whole excluding the search engines but the two are not mutually exclusive because if you are more visible throughout the web then your organic search ranks will automatically go up. You can easily publicize your site by making bookmarking and tagging easy. Just like anywhere else, a catchy title goes a long way in SMO. Your content should be concise and focused. Try to go for the top user status.

The key here is to create link bait. It is kind of a word of mouth thing for the digital age. You want your link to be distributed as much as possible. For that you have to participate very fervently and regularly, and keep in mind that this is a two way process so be open and reply and comment on other peoples’ blogs etc.

Because it is still in its nascent stage, everyday new benefits and uses of SMO are being discovered. The single most important benefit of SMO is the targeted nature of its approach. Your links are promoted only and exactly where people might be interested or would sooner or later require your services. This ensures quality traffic i.e. traffic only from prospective clients. It can also generate quantity.

SMO has been known to attract large amounts of traffic in a very short span of time but this does not mean that its effects are only short term. It guarantees steady traffic for a long time. Content sharing can be done in both audio and video formats, which is always an added advantage.

Search Engine Marketing is an online promotion method to increase the importance and visibility of a website in search engine result pages through techniques like SEO and PPC etc. The growth of any web based business depends on the web traffic it gets. Search engine marketing or SEM promotes ones website to leading search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. Search engine marketing plays an essential role in success of online business.

Not only quantity of web traffic matters, one has to ensure that he gets the quality traffic by keeping in mind the target market. In search engine marketing, there are number of techniques to promote a web site. To increase the quality flow of web traffic towards the website, one has to be careful about some steps. The very first step is to know the business details and be aware about the target clients. After targeting the audience, one can place the site’s link to places that can be visited by these groups. One can optimize the site by reorganizing the content, adding the tags, banner ads, pay per click advertisements to increase the visibility and henceforth the flow towards the site.

The Benefits of SEM are:

• Increased flow of traffic

Everyday million of searches are conducted by people who search for product, services, information etc. SEM can definitely increase the flow of traffic to ones web site.

• Targeted Audience

There is no holiday or off hours on internet. So, one can have the targeted traffic all the time that is twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. Search engine marketing adds visibility of the web site on leading search engines so that one gets the target audience every hour of each day.

• No Geographical boundaries in advertising

One can reach to global customers if engaged in international business and can lead business successfully. There are no geographical boundaries if one depends on SEM for overseas business.

• Higher Page Rank & Branding

High visibility as well as the high page rank of website on various search engines can be achieved through search engine marketing which shows visitors that the business is an authority brand. When website is frequently seen by the prospects, they remember the site which in turn builds the company brand. As a result, if a visitor does not require the product or service at the moment, they will remember the brand through the website when they require it in near future.

• Cost Effective Technique

SEM is a cost effective technique too as compared to traditional techniques that includes advertising media. Visitors through search engine are more targeted which make it easier to convert them to customers.

There are various varieties of affiliate marketing and the type depends upon how we classify them. Affiliate marketing mainly classify in two categories:-

1) PPC (Pay-Per-Click)
2) PPP (Pay-Per-Performance)

Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is one of the most popular types of affiliate marketing used to affiliate with small websites and becomes an easy way to earn online money. In this type the merchant pays to its affiliate whenever a visitor referred to its website and the affiliate also gets paid a certain amount even if the visitor visits the website but not purchased anything.

Pay Per Performance (PPF)
PPP is most popular among merchants and the most rewarding type of affiliate. In this type the merchant pays only to the affiliate when any visitor buys something from the merchant’s website. The main advantage of PPP is that the commission in PPP affiliate marketing results in the range of 15% to 20% of the actual sales and in case of e-products the commission goes on 70-75% of the sales.PPP can be classified into two further types:-

a) Pay-Per-Sales (PPS)
b) Pay-Per-Lead (PPL)

Pay Per Sales (PPS)
In this type the merchant pays the affiliate a certain amount whenever the visitor visits the merchant’s website and buys something. Affiliates generally work on commission basis and they are paid higher than the amount paid to PPC affiliate programs.

Pay Per Lead (PPL)
Pay per Lead is a little bit upgraded version of Pay per Sales and is mainly used by insurance and finance companies. In this the merchant paid to the affiliate whenever the visitor visits the merchant’s website and fills an application form related to the business of merchant’s website.

Affiliate Marketing emerges as a natural outgrowth of the popularity for back linking to other websites. Affiliate marketing is very important tool of internet marketing. It is mainly used for making money through internet. In Affiliate marketing it does not matter whether you have your own website or not but by adding various affiliate programs to the website you can add value to the website and can also maximize profits and revenue.

Affiliate marketing began in the mid-1990s and becoming a very popular way to earn online money. SEOs say that affiliate marketing is a cost effective method to generate online sales. The simplest way is just to introduce the visitors to the various business opportunities, products and services they need and also help to make online money. The concept of affiliate marketing is to selling products on commission basis. In this affiliate marketing the first step is to make a professional looking website with some good content. Affiliate marketing is mainly run by affiliate networks and also they are composed of two functional bodies and each one of them is having their special function and role. Affiliate marketing means you dont have to pay the advertiser until they sell the products and therefore also called “performance based marketing”.

Google PPC marketing can be very terrifying to the new internet marketer. Many people who are interested in starting an internet marketing business have stayed far away from Google PPC marketing campaigns because they are afraid of losing money as there are many horror stories of how people have went bankrupt over PPC.

Therefore, let us have a look to the advantages of a good PPC marketing campaign and not just, on the risks involved. Remember the saying no risk no profit. Risk is always involved in any business venture but you can make your risk in PPC a calculated risk by putting in certain monitoring and control protections.

Basically people are not aware that PPC marketing can bring more success than financial ruin. If you know how to execute a Google ad campaign then you can get rewards that a good pay per click marketing campaign can offer you in your business building strategies that other forms of online marketing cannot offer you.

PPC campaign set up is really very simple. A new Google AdWord account can be set up in minutes and usually you can start your test campaign. Your next step would be enter your campaign keywords and monitor your account daily.

I would suggest instead of sending your leads directly to your product page that you would have a lead capture page in place so that your leads will first go to a page that provides them with information about your product and educates them and then captures their information such as name, e-mail and their phone number.

Then from there you provide a link to your main selling page. No real changes will be needed to your main website page if you are an affiliate because you will be using the company provided website. If you are getting a lot of traffic daily to your site, but the conversion rate is low, then you might consider redoing your lead capture page.

Thousands of Internet users search the web daily for information on a range of products and topics. If you are not skilled in search engine optimization (SEO) and you do not have the spare time necessary to learn this knowledge, then PPC advertising will be a good option for you because you could still have your business, phrase or keyword on the first page of Google.

By having your ad seen on the first page of Google search results, the chances of driving hundreds of targeted leads daily to your website increases. Your ad should begin showing within in 30 minutes from the time you set up your campaign.

If you target the right kind of consumers with your PPC marketing ad campaign, you will be able to locate people who are ready, willing and able to buy your product.

Search Engine Marketing is very much similar to term Search Engine Optimization, well only the technical variation between the two terms in certainty is the time periods in which they were the buzz term for the industry and the way and amount of money spent on each one. Search engine marketing is liable to talk about large campaigns whereas SEO can apply to the smallest and grandest of marketing schemes.

When you say search engine marketing you should be aware this term integrate things such as PPC campaigns which of course aren’t part of SEO as PPC does not help you to rank any better in the engines unless you get natural links through the growth in traffic. SEM is a term which covers all of the SEO and the related forms of advertising to do with search engines. So basically search engine marketing is SEO and more.

This is why many SEO companies won’t run your AdSense of affiliate campaigns for you because this is the realm of search engine marketing. Some definitions place the meaning of SEM simply as a term for PPC and affiliate marketing whereas these are incorrect interpretations you should be made aware than SEM will sometimes be referred to in this manner.

The theory that Search Engine Marketing only gives short term results, and again we’re going with the narrow definition here, is perhaps fairly well founded. The problem is of course due to the costs involved in PPC it is not often a cost effective long term method, while at 1st you may receive a boom in new customers that will not continue indefinitely. And when this happens you have to re-evaluate how much you should spend on SEM whereas the affiliate side of things is normally a safe bet as the affiliates only earn a share of the profits.

So with affiliates you can’t really loose. So whenever you speak of SEM make sure that you and the person you are talking to have the same definition of what SEM entails otherwise things may get puzzling.

With the emergence of Google’s Caffeine, we’ll likely see faster indexing and more real time content in the search results, including more social media, videos and photos. But what impact if any will this latest version of Google’s search engine have on your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign?

If you’re presently following SEO best practices, then are you keeping an eye on new trends and changes in the world of search? As such, much of what Caffeine is expected to bring, will not be a surprise. To avoid serious negative repercussions from Caffeine, below are some things you can review and tweak if needed to your current on and offsite marketing strategy:

Onsite SEO

Keep your content fresh.  Regularly add new content.  Is your site still lethargic to load? Fix this problem asap! Check your site’s bounce rate. Make sure your internal links have an efficient silo structure for deep crawling to important themed pages. Always check that you have rich keyword URLs; including domain names and file names.

Offsite SEO

Keep up your link building campaign. Exclusively, keep those “quality relevant links” coming to your site. It’s even better if the links are.edu or.org sites. Create original content regularly from your blogs and social media sites. Your newsworthy articles, as well as relevant photos, videos, and tweets can offer helpful back links to your site along with additional and real time search visibility.

Social media, particularly focusing on the social networking sites, is swiftly becoming the staple form of content online - user generated content is also some of the most important, as it is the honest voice of the public.

Social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, linkedin and YouTube are among the more popular and profitable social networks. They’re freely available for anyone to use, and are challenging the convention of traditional media. Social media optimization, or SMO, involves using this new form of media to increase your web presence and overall credibility.

Optimize for your keywords, but always try and use fresh content rather than replicating old copy across the internet. Include the appropriate keywords, but not so much that the reader finds it repetitive.

Blogging is the best way to create content on an ongoing basis, as there is always a new angle to take or industry news to relate - it’s not like setting copy into stone on your formal website; it has the potential to be much more personal and interactive than that.

Even more uncomplicated, personal and interactive, micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter are great ways to increase search engine visibility through the community of users.

Everything you do online should be easy for users to share. Chicklets are the little buttons which are inserted added to blogs and websites making social bookmarking possible at the click of a button. Use them in your content, and bookmark your new blog posts. We will be looking at how to use social bookmarking sites to increase your web presence in the future, so remember to keep an eye out on this blog.

Probably the most important aspect to SMO is social discussion and commentary. It’s no good being silent or stagnant online - the internet is way too interactive for that. Comment on blogs, ask questions, provide answers and generally just use your pulpit wisely.

Google has launched the new algorithm called “Google Caffeine”. This algorithm is basically a math problem to filter and determine the search results. Google always try something new and this time Google come up with some new algorithm to generate relevant search results. Google Caffeine provides search results faster than any other search engine for example when you search any keyword like SEO then you can get answer in 0.15 seconds as compared to normal Google. SEOs now have to follow the rules and guidelines of Google Caffeine for example now SEOs have to write daily articles with no duplicate contents for the website and regularly update the website to come first on the Google rankings.

Some of the changes:-

1) Website Speed
The first guideline of Google Caffeine is that you should not have a slow loading website because if your website is slow then it might not get any higher ranking on Google.

2) Broken Links
If your website is having some broken links then this might shows a negative impact of your website in google search results.

3) Bad Neighborhoods
If your website is linking to spammers and you are getting a lot of links from these spammers then it isn’t good for your rankings on Google caffeine algorithm.

4) Overall Quality
Google’s caffeine always takes a closer look at the overall quality of your website. So it’s mandatory that your website should have new content as well as have links to the good websites.

Pay per Click (PPC) is a promotion method offered by Search Engines in which an advertiser pays for each click on their advert. PPC adverts can be displayed on Search Engine results pages and content websites.

Search engine result pages are the result pages where a user has searched for a specific keyword and is delivered a page listing relevant PPC adverts that sit alongside the Organic Search results. Content targeting refers to PPC adverts being displayed on content pages.

PPC adverts are most often displayed at the top, bottom and right-hand side of the SERPs. The position of the advert on the page is determined by a bidding system.

Though bidding higher amounts of money will normally result in a higher position, some Search Engines consider several aspects in the ranking of adverts. Google, for example uses a “Quality Score” which considers the click-through rate (CTR) of your advert as well as the relevance of your ad text to both the keywords and your website’s landing page. The “Quality Score” also helps Google determine your cost per click (CPC). The less relevant your advert and landing page are, the more you will have to pay to display that advert in a high position.

The bidding price for the keyword is also highly variable. General keywords like “car rental” are more expensive and will generate more impressions than a specific keyword phrase like “cheap rental car in cape town”. As more and more companies adopt PPC marketing, keyword bidding prices are increasing and advert positioning is becoming more competitive. Therefore it is important to focus your budget on attracting the right type of people to your site by outlining a clear PPC strategy.