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It was once called keyword research. You needed to use keywords in your content and metatags to get the search engines to rank you for those words.

Then it became SEO, Search Engine Optimizaqtion, and included link building and other things as part of the strategy to get more traffic to your website. This was before Google was a portal. Good original content and link popularity were always important before Matt Cutts had a blog and before you could perform searches through Google.

Then along came SEM, Search Engine Marketing. This is the part of your Internet marketing plan that is geared completely toward search engine traffic and includes PPC.

Now with the popularity of social networking, comes SMO, Social Media Optimization. Not like we needed to confuse the average user anymore than we already have.

Social Media Optimization
Most Internet users have heard of Search Engine Marketing (SEO) but the new “buzz word” in the Internet Marketing world is Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO tactics are used to drive large amounts of people to a web site through new channels. Google and Yahoo, while still major players, are not the only sites that push traffic anymore. The basis of Social Media Optimization lies in creating a community that brings interested users together. Wikipedia describes social media as… “The online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs.”

The old version of online marketing and the new have one very important rule in common: content is king. Writing a blog (online web log) that does little more than advertise your services or products will not create a community. Writing a blog that shares your expertise, opinions, latest industry news, and your insights has the potential to bring in interested visitors and gives them a reason to come back. Linking your blog to sites like Digg (digg.com), del.icio.us (del.icio.us.com), and Facebook (facebook.com) will spread your message across the Internet faster than any search engine. This is the Internet’s version of “word of mouth” marketing. People will have the opportunity to read your posts, visit your site and learn more about you and your business.

Those are some great tips, but the writer only includes a small number of the social websites you need to use to do proper SMO. There. I used it. SMO. Getting used to it I guess. He didn’t mention StumbleUpon which brings in a ton of traffic and didn’t mention propeller.com that can help you get great search engine ranklings for your bookmarks. He didn’t mention reddit.com.

Well let’s just say don’t limit yourself to only the three mentioned in the post or the ones I added. Search google for a list of social networking or social bookmarking sites and you’ll find all you need.

CENTER>The Rest of The Blog Post on SMO is here

Feel that social bookmarking is an important part of your marketing plan? What percentage of your Internet Marketing Budget is allocated for social bookmarking and social networking then?

This study shows you how marketers acknowledge social bookmarking with their words but not with their dollars.

Social media unworthy of budget?
by Helen Leggatt

Seventy-eight percent of marketing professionals polled in Coremetrics’ annual “Face of the New Marketer” survey saw that social media marketing was a way of getting an edge on their competitors. However, just 7.7 percent of their total online marketing spend was allocated to it compared to 33 percent to online advertising and 28 percent on online promotion design and implementation.

Are you putting enough time and money into your social bookmarking and social networking plan? I think the study is wrong as far as the percentage that is spent on online promotion design and implementation though. I believe if you factor in smaller businesses the percentage that goes into those things is much higher because they have smaller budgets even though design costs stay the same.

Here is more from the actual survey;

58% of respondents have implemented user-generated content or reviews in the past year
31% of respondents have implemented a blog in the past year
25% of respondents have implemented an RSS feed in the past year

For next year,
50% of respondents plan to implement user-generated content or reviews
22% of respondents plan to implement a blog
20% intend to implement social networks, and another 20% plan to implement an RSS feed

If your company is one of those that is planning to implement more social networking, blogging, rss feeds, etc., and you lack the tools or expertise to implement it wisely, email namecritic@blogcontentprovider.com with your phone number and url. We will help you create a plan that fits your budget.

I found a great page of plugins and information about stopping blog spam. Most are tips about wordpress blog spam but soem are for moveable type and other platforms as well.

PPP = PR0

Pay Per Post was a good idea that came about 2 years too late. I tried it for a client and had bloggers write product reviews. it owrked out ok, but not worth the 15% fee Pay Per Post wanted.

Had they started earlier they would have had a chance to make more money before Google basically shut them down. I know pay Per Post is still there, but I don’t see how advertisers are going to want to have posts made on PR0 blogs.

I also don’t see bloggers wanting to risk their page rank just to make a little money from Pay Per Post. So am I predicting the demise of Pay Per Post? Well . . . Yeah.

Google has given bloggers who blog for Pay Per Post a PR 0. The blogs may still rank well in the search engines, but Google effectively killed the idea of having advertisers bid on blog posts based on the PR of the blog.

Will we see yet another lawsuit against Google for doing something with PageRank. Maybe, but it won’t fly. The bottom line is you can complain all you want about google and page rank but they own page rank. They can do with it as they please.

I’m glad I did not use my blogs with Pay Per Post. I was definitely tempted.

If you want a real job blogging where you are paid monthly for posting to daily blogs for companies, click here and send in the blogger job form.

Is there any room left for your browser to actually see webpages? Are you a social marketing Guru who has a membership at 40 or more social networking or social bookmarking sites? Well there is a new one you can add.

My FB Toolbar: Facebook Toolbar for Internet Explorer
by Adam Ostrow for Mashable.com

Internet Explorer users, your Facebook toolbar has finally arrived. Facebook launched a browser toolbar for Firefox last year, but has not yet made available an official toolbar for IE, which, despite what you might like to believe, still owns the majority of the Web browser market.

Hmmm. I like PCWorld but this guy is making predictions about social bookmarking I find hard to believe. It was a list of the 15 tech disappointments of 2007. I’ll share a couple of them.

#13. Web 2 Woe: Social Networks

Memo to Badoo, Bebo, Catster, Dogster, Facebook, Faceparty, Flickr, Flixster, Hi5, Hyves, Imbee, Imeem, MySpace, Mixi, Pizco, Pownce, Takkle, Twitter, Virb, Vox, Xanga, Xing, Zoomr … and the 3,245,687 other social networks clamoring for our limited attention spans: We got it. Making connections between friends is cool. Sharing photos and videos, even cooler. But it’s all so… 2006. Haven’t you got anything new to show us?

Here’s a safe bet: Two years from now, 90 percent of these networks will be gone and their founders will be back working at Starbucks. I’ll have a double mocha frappucino, please.

I would not call that a safe bet with DIGG selling for $300 million.

#4. In a Sorry State: Yahoo
We can’t say we really expected much out of Yahoo in 2007. Giving CEO Terry Semel the boot was probably a good thing–especially after his $230 million compensation package came to light. Installing the original Yahoo, Jerry Yang, as head honcho also seems like a smooth move, even if the company seems permanently stuck in the number two position behind Google.

Yet there’s one area where Yahoo can lay claim to being number one: creating political prisoners. At least three times over the past five years, information supplied by Yahoo to the Bejiing government has led to the incarceration of Chinese dissidents.

This year, Yahoo executives admitted they’d lied to Congress when they claimed not to know why the Chinese demanded their subscriber data. Yang and general counsel Michael Callahan were forced to deliver a humbling public apology in front of a Congressional committee. Shortly thereafter, the company settled a suit brought by two of the dissidents’ families.

Not so smooth.

Hmmm. I agree. Not too smooth.

#3. The Anti-Social Network: Facebook Beacon
We have to give props to Facebook for stealing the social networking spotlight from MySpace this year. But once it got up on stage, Facebook laid an egg. For example, opening up the Facebook platform to third-party developers was inspired. Now, six months later, those viral-to-the-point-of-influenza Facebook apps are mostly just irritating. (For the 27th time: No, I do not want to spam everyone in my network with another movie quiz, thank you. Now go away.)

The introduction of Facebook’s Beacon advertising program was more than disappointing–it was disturbing. Suddenly, anything you purchased on Amazon, Overstock, Fandango or three dozen other sites would be broadcast to your Facebook friends. Worse, even when you were logged out, Facebook still gathered the information, though the company says it didn’t use the data.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized and offered subscribers easier ways to opt out of Beacon, but the damage was already done, says Richard Laermer, principal at RLM PR in New York and author of Punk Marketing.

“The idea behind Beacon is fascinating, but the fact that it was being done for subscribers by someone else was less than cool,” he says. “It’s like me fishing in your trash can for your store receipts (you haven’t spotted me yet?) and then telling other people what you’ve bought. Not illegal, but oh so creepy.”

How much damage has Beacon done to Facebook’s rep? “Their PR value just went down about 40 percent,” he adds.

Good try on the whole beacon thing Facebook. That qualifies as a really huge backfire more than just a disappointment.

Windows Vista was number 1 on his list. I’m sure that is a surprise.

Windows Live Upgrades Mobile Search, Now a Viable Challenge to Google Maps

The Windows Live Maps team announced an update to their mobile browser-based map and search service, m.live.com.

The new version includes greater detail in listings, aggregated reviews and photos of restaurants and other businesses, scrollable maps and more.

It’s a very nice service that warrants more attention in a world all-too-often focused exclusively on Google when it comes to mapping. Other than Google Maps’ new location discovery feature, Live.com’s mobile service is significantly more sophisticated.

Windows? Microsoft? More sophisticated at something than Google? Hmmm. sounds suspicious to me.

MobileSearchPPC.com is for sale for just $100. Any takers? email namecritic@blogs.pn

I guess that will be the next catchphrase among the more social seo people in 2008. remember you heard the term here first. Well, don’t. It’s pretty cheesy so i don’t really want to be the one credited with coining this phrase.

Match.com hooks up with Facebook
By Michael Estrin

What do you get when you combine a popular dating site with a hot social network? If you’re IAC boss Barry Diller, it could be a match made in heaven. According to an Associated Press report, IAC’s Match.com plans to release a new application in conjunction with Facebook later this week that will link users from both sites.

Known as Little Black Book, the Match Facebook application is designed to give the dating site more of a social networking component while giving Facebook access to Match’s roughly 15 million members. Little Black Book will match Facebook users with other Facebook users who are on Match.

Yeah. Social Dateworking. That will be my term for facebook fom now on. They get their own category. I guess for some seo people who use facebook for social marketing and who spend all of their time on the computer will now have a chance to find dates while they do their marketing.

Ok, I got this in a newsletter and just had to ask myself if this guy has just run out of things to talk about or what?

How Do E-Mail Newsletters Compare to Blogs?
by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor, Web Marketing Today

Well, Doc. I’d start by saying that ezines are different than blogs the same as apples are different to baboons. Oh wait apple and baboon both have an a in them so they are more similar than ezines and blogs.

Of course, I’m a veteran e-mail newsletter publisher — that’s my bias. But blogging has certainly established itself as a powerful marketing medium. Here are some of the differences between the media:

I agree. Dr. Ralph F. Wilson has been in the email newsletter business since I can remember and I’ve been around a long time. I know I’m picking on him a little here, but I think Dr. Wilson hasn’t quite grasped blogging yet. Both newsletters and blogs are good and have their advantages, but they aren’t really comaprable since each has different goals or reasons for being used.

Let’s start with definitions. A blog (short for “web log”) is a website in which entries are typically displayed in reverse chronological order. The most common blogging platforms are easy to use content management systems which notify subscribers of a new blog post by means of RSS feeds. E-mail newsletters, on the other hand, are usually published using third-party Email Marketing Service (EMS) providers such as iContact or ConstantContact.

Again, pointing out that they are 2 different things altogether.

Blogs are certainly easier to publish than e-mail newsletters — and much faster. The blogging platform allows you to write and instantly publish your thoughts with a built-in content management system, so the most recent blog automatically becomes part of your website content. E-mail newsletters, on the other hand, aren’t so automatic. They must be written, laid out in an attractive HTML format, copied into a web interface at the EMS provider site, and scheduled to be sent out. If you want to add the content to your website (which I strongly recommend), that is a separate step altogether.

Again, pointing out that they are 2 different things altogether.

The most popular blogging platforms are free — Blogger, WordPress.com, WordPress.org, and others. This is one of the reasons that blogging has grown so rapidly. EMS providers usually charge on the basis of the number of e-mails sent to subscribers each month, though some charge based on the size of the mailing list.

Yet another way they are two very different things.

Blogging at its best includes frequent posts. Three times a week might be an appropriate minimum for an active blogger. A frequent poster is seen in a positive light. E-mail newsletters should be published a minimum of once a month. Once a week is possible, but the content has to be excellent. E-mail too often, and you’ll be perceived as spamming.

Yet another way they are two very different things. he continues to point out that ezines and blogs are not the same thing.

Subscribers click on a link in the RSS feed to read the latest post on the blog website. E-mail newsletters, however, arrive in the subscriber’s e-mail box; the reader doesn’t usually have to go to a website to read the newsletter, as is the case in a blog.

Blog readership can be measured by unique visitors to the blog site and by the number of subscribers to an RSS feed (tracked, for example, by FeedBurner). E-mail newsletter readers are measured by the number of subscribers, qualified by such fuzzy metrics as open rate and inbox delivery rate. Since spam filters dispose of a significant percentage of even double opt-in newsletters, e-mail delivery isn’t as reliable as it used to be. However, nearly 100% of Internet users actively use e-mail. Active RSS reader users, on the other hand are only a fraction of that — though RSS users tend to be more active Internet citizens and visit more websites.

Hmmm. He failed to mention that users can subscribe to blogs and have it delivered to their email daily, so blogs can reach everyone that uses email too.

The biggest difference between blog and e-mail newsletter approaches to reaching subscribers is the e-mail subscriber list. E-mail newsletter publishers have an actual list of e-mail addresses — and often names and locations — of their subscribers, while bloggers have no tangible list at all.

Uhh, Doc, we do have a tangible list of subscribers just as ezine publishers do. We have both blogs and a newsletter that people subscribe to once per week to get summaries of posts we made throughout the week. My ezine subscribers do not necessarily visit the blog daily. They get to visit once per week to catch up on what has been going on.

An active, up-to-date list is considered a business asset, since it enables the publisher to push to subscribers newsletters and advertising at will. It can’t force subscribers to open or even read an e-mail, but it can count on delivery of a high percentage of the e-mails sent — despite the challenges posed by spam and spam filters.

This applies to both blogs and ezines. Hey, we did finally find a similarity!

So which is best? Blogs or e-mails? I don’t think one size fits all. I’m an e-mail newsletter publisher and an evangelist for the benefits of this kind of marketing. However, many, many businesses have found blogging a successful way to get the word out.

Choose both. It’s not one or the other here. You can blog every day, which you should, then you can put summaries of your blog posts into a newsletter and send it out to your email list. Having a newsletter and a blog work together is a great way to reach people the way they choose to be reached.

Our blogging service includes posting daily to your business blog, social bookmarking, and you have the option of having us also build and manage your newsletter as well. Click here and fill out the form to contact us if interested in hearing how we can help you with your blog marketing plan.

I was reading this post by a guy who seems to just hate anyone who gives advice about blogging and he seems to believe that if something did not work for him that it must not work for anyone else.

Ignore the bloggers grammar. I’m sure it isn’t his fault. He is posting about blogging tips that he considers outdated.

Submit Your Blog To Blog Directories. - How many of you have submitted your blogs to all those directories and gained from it? Some takes months for your blog to be listed and when it does gets listed, what did you get? Hundreds of hits? Got a good back-link which Google almost don’t recognise now? It’s an outdated tip.

There are still good blog directories that will get you some traffic. I’ll list my blog in a directory if it gets me one new reader. There are millions of blogs for people to choose from. The more exposure you get, the better. It doesn’t matter what google thinks of the link.

Ping Your Blogs To The hundreds of Ping Sites - Except for the few big ones today, all the rest can be ignored.

Again, it’s his opinion. But it’s like saying ignore the small search engines. Can you afford to ignore any new traffic? So pinging a lot of sites when you post is still not outdated.

Submit Articles to Ezines - This was a tip I used and got bitten. Did not get a single hit from the articles I submitted but all my articles got ripped from Ezines by some arseholes for their sites that has noting but stolen contents and full of Adsense.

This is not a blogging tip in the first place. This is a tip for anyone with a website and Article Marketing is still alive and well. His lack of response and lack of success at it could have something to do with the quality of the articles he submitted. I can’t be sure but after reading this blog post I can make an educated guess.

Join A Blog Carnival - The most you get will be from the same group that took part in that carnival and for the duration of that carnival. Total waste of time.

I don’t participate in these but any networking opportunity is only as good as you make it.

Join A Forum - Unless you go and participate actively in at least 10 Forums or unless you are an established blogger, Forums are also a waste of time. If you go and join a very popular forum like Digitalpoint, introduce yourself, do you think all the participants will rush to your blog and check you out? NO. You have to spend months getting to know them. Chat with them. Become their friends. Even that does not guarantee they will read your blog. And how many friends can you actually make? 50 is already an exaggerated figure. How many will become your blog’s reader? Out of the 50, maybe 5.

Again, joining forums is not really a blogging tip. But forums were the first social networking websites. And again, it seems this blogger did not have much success posting in forums so it must not be good for anyone else either. Networking is what you make of it. If your social skills are not very good then you won’t likely do well in a social atmosphere.

Comment in other blogs - This a social practice. Commenting in others blog shows you either appreciate what has been written or you have conflicting views. It is an interaction between bloggers. It is a polite thing to do. If you hope to get all your readers from your commenting practise, then be prepared to comment in a few thousand blogs each day. You can build a community of your own through your comments. Try commenting in some high profile blogs. You will never ever get that blogger to come and comment back in your blog. So don’t hang your hopes on building your blogs with your comments.

I love that, “You will never ever get that blogger to come and comment back in your blog”. Ok, Mr. Negative. I get people to come and comment back to my blogs all the time without asking them to, so just because your socializing on the web didn’t work out, don’t assume it won’t work for anyone else.

So where can you go for all the new age blogging tips? I am no guru, but here is a good start. As I learn, I will implement. If it works I will share. If it doesn’t I will shut up. How does that sound? You will only get the tips that works. Sorry.. can’t help whoring myself a bit, but you do know how to subscribe don’t you?

If I was to wait on this guy to find anything that works for him I’d be too old to do any blogging.

Sorry I had to pick on this “down in his luck, black cloud over his head, i hate blog gurus, nothing works guy”, but it was so negative I couldn’t resist.