Two months ago Rohit Bhargava wrote an entry on his blog about the five rules his firm uses to socially optimize a site. This article is credited with pushing Social Media Optimization (SMO) to the forefront of our industry.
SMO can be defined in many different ways, but for the sake of this article, let's define SMO as the practice of structuring your published content in a way that's easy for social media sites to recognize and for your readers to syndicate.
Optimizing your site for social media can mean a couple different actions. I'll describe the two that I consider the most important this week, and in part two will write about the next three.
1) Make Tagging/Book marking Easier (Rohit's rule #2) -
More and more traffic is driven by social media sites like MySpace, Digg, and Delicious. The easier you make it for your readers to push your content to the top of a Digg or Delicious, the more likely your traffic will benefit from this channel. The key: Show buttons that make it easy for a reader to Digg, or Post to Delicious, or any of the other sites that combine social bookmarking/blogging/syndication.
Within the past 18 months or so, the trend on content sites has changed from having a user rank your article (I.E. 1-5 stars) to trying to get readers to Digg and promote your articles outside of your site. Having readers rank an article on your site is useful for sites where content ranking really matters, for example, Citysearch and Yelp. But a much stronger proposition is giving users the tool to 'Digg' a page on your site, so you can rank your content against the rest of the content on the web. It is much more difficult to move to the top, but also much more rewarding.
It is not easy to stay on top of the latest and greatest of these sites, but is necessary as these sites are a quickly growing segment of traffic. The below link creates HTML that you can post on your site to make it as easy as possible for users to rate your content. I would recommend choosing three of the buttons from the link and placing them at the top and bottom of every web page that you would like to drive traffic to: http://www.ifeedreaders.com/social-creator/
2) Make your URLs easy to Link to (Rohit's #1)
Keep your links short and simple. Many search engines (and more so, social search engines) give points to various aspects of a webpage. Many engines still give credence to the assumption that if you have keywords in your URL, the page contains information about that topic. The keywords in the URL will help the web page come up higher in search results from those keywords. This factor has declined as people game the system, but still affects rankings. Another reason a link-friendly URL is important is for sharing the webpage. Even if you have an "Email-a-Friend" option, there are readers who prefer to paste the URL in an Email they send out. If your URL is too long the link may break on line breaks in your Email, or may not work at all, particularly on the mobile channel (I.E. smart phones). Which link would you rather click on?
http://www.shopathome.com/Anniversary/Honeymoon/Share.aspx?SID=114
or
http://cgi.ebay.com/TMX-TICKLE-ME-ELMO-10th-ANN-SEALED-
SHIPS-SAME-DAY_W0QQitemZ320038304072QQihZ011QQcategoryZ
19229QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
If you want people to spread your content, you need to make it as easy as possible to share that content. In part two I’ll discuss three other rules for SMO, and some examples of companies worth emulating.
Digg 
