My name is Zafar Ahmed, I am an SEO based in Pakistan

Until recently, the concept of the search engine optimization (SEO) is an ever growing phenomenon. It has been turned out a perfect blend of art and technology that many professionals employ to raise the ranking of their site in organic listing. Although the power of SEO is a highly acceptable fact today, many professionals are now taking keen interest in social media optimization (SMO) strategies to increase the visibility of their sites.

To put it simply, SMO refers to the condition of optimization where a site is optimized as highly visible to different social media or bookmarking websites such as del.icio.us or technorati.com and the like. This increased visibility influences the site’s linking to bookmarking sites, higher ranking in the custom searches of these bookmarking sites and integration to different relevant blog posts, vlogs or podcasts. Let us find out few effective social media optimization (SMO) strategies.

Bookmarking and Tagging – Just Keep Them Simple

There are few people who love to see things from a complicated perspective, although complications never rule out simplicity. So is true with this web world, especially when you care to bookmark or tag your pages. Just make it pretty sure that all your pages carry relevant tag lists coupled with automated suggestion note. Additionally, you should also make it very clear that the bookmarking or tagging is needed in a deep linking version, and not as a mere home page (index) page tagging. Are you wondering about deep linking? Just do the tagging for the rest of the pages also apart from the index page only.

Raise Your Linkability

This is the most vital step that any webmasters should take. Since many sites targeting for product selling are meant to be static, which means they rarely receive the chance of getting updated. But if you would like to increase the visibility of your site in social media background, raising linkability is really important. You can raise the linkability of your site in a wide variety of ways including blog integration, white paper addition, thought pieces integration or aggregating content from somewhere else and integrated to the web pages.

Take a Ride with Your Content

Who does not like to travel? Almost everyone does. So is true with the content of your site. Once you can make your content happy by letting it travel to elsewhere, it will return you benefits. Although the idea of SEO is very much limited to the implementation of changing the site, SMO has more extended outlook. To make your content travel, do care to make your content in a portable format by converting it in either PDF documents or audio or video files and post them to a wide number of sites to let them take a ride further. This in turn helps you in increasing back links.

Invite Inbound Links

Inbound links pretty much work like a measuring scale in most of the times. They are simply great in raising your site’s or blog’s rank in the search engine as well as in overall ranking, if you can do them wisely. However, the inbound source is quite important and it does not add any value if it comes from some substandard sites or blogs like those which have a very low ranking or banned and those who do not have relevant themes. Otherwise, if you would like to attract inbound links, you must care to invite them by rewarding permanent links to listing recent blog linking, so that they can have increased visibility also by linking to your site.

Mashupping Is Important

When you are social enough in your real life, it increases your chances of being popular on time. So is true with social media optimization. When you allow others to use your content in their site, of course under some specific condition, it increases the visibility of your site or blog. There are few video networks like YouTube that allows you and others to embed the video from the site with the help of some auto-generated codes. This certainly enhances the visibility for the sites from which the video are taking into. One can take the same action with his contents also by syndicating it through RSS and allow others mashupping to attract visitors or enhance the visibility of the content.

Inspire to Become an Ultimate Guide

In this virtual world, people usually look for valuable contents. So being an expert in any specific area does help without any fail. Be an ultimate resource guide for your readers. Once you do that, it will automatically give you higher visibility in return. So adding value to the users is crucially important to the survival in this virtual base and you must include outbound links as well to help the users meeting their objectives and purposes. If you can do that wisely, linking to the competitors even can return you benefit. Users will link your site in social media and tag you as the best guide on the community. As time goes on, this will add value in relevant search engine queries.

Staying Updated Is Important

Be creative and insightful in your approaches. There are few people who are having about trying and implementing new things. This attitude is quite backdated and unhealthy too if you care to make a position in the social media space. It is important to stay updated and try each new thing that comes on your way. Keep your content fresh and trendy always, no exception. The virtual space of social media is radically dynamic and it is influenced by morphological features, so if you ignore trying new tools, new techniques or products, you may are at higher risk for your own existence in this social media networking.

Implement SMO as an Integral Part of Your Business

So you cared enough about search engine optimization technique and made it as an integral part of your online business strategy. Now the time has come doing the same with SMO techniques as well. You should find the best suitable ways to implement SMO as an integral part of your business in terms of creating documents and distributing information. There are many helpful opportunities out there that can help you to grow in social media. Starting from sharing in social bookmarking sites to rewarding incoming links, there are many other vital ways that can significantly influence your reputation, social influence, traffic, sales and credibility, etc.

Many people wonder about the differences between search engine positioning and search engine optimization. Search engine positioning refers to the condition of placing exact keywords and phrases that the prospective buyers usually put in the search box at the time they search for a specific product or service. On the other hand, if you consider the technique from the same perspective, search engine optimization comparatively seems to be an easier resolution, although it is not a piece of cake indeed. But if you compare the technicalities between search engine positioning and search engine optimization, undoubtedly search engine optimization is bit more complicated.

Search Engine Optimization: A Brief Overview

Search engine optimization refers to the technique of making the site in such a fashion so that it can be called by the search engine easily. If your site is optimized for search engine, you can rest be assured of attracting traffic in a considerable amount of time. SEO is a technique working as a marketing policy to increase the relevance of a website. The SEO acts as the considering factor for the working principle of search algorithms and keywords.

The efforts involved in SEO include structure, presentation, and coding of a website. It is also capable of fixing the problems causing ineffectual search engine listings. Some of the most highly ranked search engines like Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! Make use of crawlers for finding out the pages for getting the algorithmic results. The pages which are linked by the sources from other search engine listings generally do not require submission as they are obtained automatically.

Search Engine Positioning: A Brief Overview

Search engine positioning refers to the technique to attract targeted traffic to the website by positioning it at the higher rank in the SERPs or Search Engine Result Pages. In order to attain higher position at the search engine, the first and foremost important thing is that your site must carry informative content, no matter what your business strategy is, if you are selling products or dealing with information, your site needs to be content rich. In addition, it is also important that your site should have proper navigation including intra and inter pages. Moreover, highly quality inbound and outbound links are also important.

In practice, the professionals involved in search engine positioning usually cover few essential areas including:

1- quick and easy submission of web site URL to a wide number of search engines

2- understanding of particular keywords

3- popularizing links

4- saturation of search engine

5- enhancing keywords position

6- link formation

7- driving traffic

8- increasing site visibility

9- analyzing the keywords ranking in different search engines

10- generation report based on ranking

11- tracking information based on self and competitors’ website.

Exact Keywords and Phrases

Like any site owner, if you want to raise the position of your site in the search engine, then you must understand the role of exact keywords and phrases. It is important to identify the exact keywords and phrases accurately, appropriate selection and ultimate positioning can help your site to gain higher ranking in the search engine and these three factors act as determining factors that in combination govern the positioning of the site in the search engine. Now if you consider this from the perspective of search engine optimization, selecting keywords and phrases is crucial to the needs of site optimization for the purpose of driving targeted traffic to the site or blog.

Reciprocal Link Exchange Program

If you are enough serious about raising your position higher at Google, reciprocal link exchange program (RLEP) has possibly no better alternative. There are two independent ways that you can employ to make your page optimized for search engine positioning. These are – (1) integrating page with lots of information and (2) to take active participation in RLEP. Here is the marked difference in the area of both of these ways of implementation. While the first one is governed by the extensive application of search engine optimization, the later is directed by search engine positioning. To put it simply, RLEP facilitates an environment where webmasters, site owners and companies exchange web links with each other.

Optimization vs. Positioning – More to Do with SEM

When we are talking about optimization, both on pages and off pages, our idea for optimization is standing more or less on a surface level. While on page SEO deals with on page keyword based optimization, the later deals with improved linkability. On the other hand, positioning, as described by many experts, refers to the keyword placement in a given document at its basic referencing. So, when we come to understand the requirement and relevancy of keyword placement in a document, the next question that strikes our mind is to find out the exact location for placing those keywords in the document so that the search engines can easily read them.

As a matter of fact, it reveals from the entire discussion that search engine optimization works like the basic foundation of the page, whereas, positioning offers it a new and enhanced dimension. Consider it simply, the first thing that you must do is to create quality content. Then you should do on page optimization with the help of keyword selection, keyword relevancy and keyword density. After that, you must put time in building both inbound and outbound links so that it can increase site’s visibility. Once you are ready with this, you put effort to improve the ranking of your page, so that your site gets higher positioning in the search engine.

The best places to position the keywords in a document include the title of the page, Meta tags, Meta description, introductory paragraph in the body, and heading tags. When you have the idea about what you are going to use as a part of your keyword selection, it is the next step that you must understand and place your keywords in the document appropriately. Once you have done with both of the placements, surely you are enough closer to the whole process.

If you are developing your website, you must have heard of a simple term ‘optimization’ with no exception, right? Well, there are definitely certain optimization rules out there that you must employ to make your site (web pages) search engine friendly, again with no exception. But trust me dude, there are many mistakes out there too that can keep your site at bay in no time, once again, there is ABSOLUTELY NO EXCEPTION. In this article, we will focus on finding out top 10 SEO mistakes that many people employ to make their sites just dead!

Splash Page Is Not Worthy At All

Splash page is something that is created with beautiful pictures coupled with a very tiny welcome message, sometimes even not like that and the entire text part is just missing from it. Definitely, splash page makes a great visual intro to your site, but trust that either, this exclusively can bring a disaster to your site if you are considering it from the perspective of search engine optimization. Admitted that a splashing page may definitely enhance the beauty of the page, but it does not do any benefit to the SEO optimization to your page. In fact, flash movie although gives a great appeal to the pages, but does not do any better with SEO techniques.

Care to Put Image by Replacing Texts?

Then Better You Don’t Care for SEO Optimization. Many webpage designers put their best effort on substituting texts with images just to enhance the beauty and information security of their pages. Indeed it is one of the brightest ideas that can protect your content from getting stolen, but this is not at all a GOOD IDEA if you would like to make your pages search engine optimized. It is truly a drastic disastrous decision if you convert all the texts of your pages into .jpg or .gif images. Well, it is always good to put relevant pictures in the pages and doing this will make your pages more appealing to the visitors. But do not replace the texts with images at any cost. Be aware.

‘Untitled Document’ – Is this the Page All About?

Are you so lazy that you can’t feel like changing the Title Tag. Many people yet care to spend their time to make their website, but they leave the work in either such a hurry or feeling so less enthusiastic that they simply do not put much attention over naming their pages. This is not at all a good practice. If you don’t put Title Tag, just be sure that you are at high chances of dooming your site’s SERP ranking. In most of the cases, search engines do not find any interest in your site if you do not have your pages appropriately tagged with keyword rich meaningful titles. In fact, naming it as “Home Page”, “My Page” or “Welcome to My Site” also does not help.

Putting Irrelevant Keywords Not an Ethical Choice to Get Attention

So are you selling “Travel Trailer” from your site, but you are not quite happy with the number of visitors bumping across your pages daily? Then one day you decided to put hot keywords in your pages, yet irrelevant such as “auto insurance quotes”, “peritoneal mesothelioma” and the like just to make your pages optimized in the eye of the search engine. Needless to say, if you are doing this, you are virtually inviting two potential risks for your site and none of them really take you to any benefit either. First of all, you do miss the chances of getting returning visitors in your page, especially those who came based on those irrelevant keywords and the other one is definitely getting banned if caught anyway. Be aware.

Are You Thrilled about Being Invisible?

Although a few number of ‘dishonest’ and ‘less competent’ people (in fact, in some cases few so-called SEO professionals) prefer to trick search engines by inputting invisible keywords in your pages, this is a clean way to get your site banned if caught by search engine spiders. Putting keywords invisible in a page is not a daunting task as it is with many other ‘cheats’. Just make the foreground and background color same and Bingo! Your ‘cheats’ are invisible, but to the visitors of your page, not to the search engines. Search engines do not ‘see’ in the same way as your visitors ‘see’, they look into the codes, and needless to say, codes can’t make your hidden texts really ‘hidden’. Taking the risk of getting banned, then do it!

Bad Neighbors Are Always Bad!

Haven’t you heard your mom telling you not to make friends with Bad Boys? This is not a rule for childhood only, but this is a rule for lifetime, so is true with SEO management. If you really care about your SERP ranking and do have a keen interest in making it higher, do not share link, both back link and to link, with ‘Bad’ sites. With the phrase ‘Bad Sites’, here we refer those sites having broken links, irrelevant themes, low rankings, or banned. No use, even if you find yourself much tempted about getting a link from those sites. Only ranking to Top Sites can higher your chances of getting high SERP ranking.

Spamming in a Hope of Overflow?

Are you spamming with a hope of getting overflowed with visitors? In fact, many ‘dishonest’ and ‘tricky’ webmasters play this game to trick the visitors to increase page view. If you are doing the same, just make yourself pretty sure with the idea that you are not the cleverer than search engine. Many before you tried the same technique. In return, they only enjoy having a lower ranking and a banned at the worst. So do not try to trick the search engine with loads of repeated keywords in your pages for getting higher SERP ranking. Excessively high keyword density returns nothing, and search engines just ban the page.