We often talk about keywords in this industry.

“Social Media Optimisation” is one of the big keywords for progressive SEO companies in 2008.

It is still something of a tricky concept for people to get their heads around. While the benefits of SEO are measurable and highly visible, SMO is often viewed as more like traditional marketing; ie harder to measure. Actually, this is something of a sweeping statement, as certain aspects of SMO can be easily measured, while others, admittedly, cannot. If you are looking increasing traffic to your website, for example, or linkbaiting, this is all just as easy to measure as traditional linkbuilding work. Of course, you are putting yourself on the line a little more by releasing material into the public sphere, but a well planned and controlled project can be very rewarding.

Blogs, file sharing, social bookmarking, forums. The internet facilitates the transfer of information. Interacting with Social Media allows a brand to influence at least some of the information that is being passed around. Many people are afraid of potential negative comments harming their brand, as opposed to building it, but a well managed complaint can be a real positive.

Think about it. If you have had a complaint about a product or service in the past, what do you remember about it now? The fault itself or the way your complaint was dealt with? It’s probably a mix of the two. If you had a complaint that was badly dealt with, it is unlikely that you stayed loyal to that brand. If the complaint was handled with thought and care, it is likely that you remember that good service.

Don’t be afraid of Social Media!

For all its public travails, nobody can accuse Yahoo!’s developers from slacking off. We were quite excited to see del.icio.us results being integrated into SERPs a couple of months ago, and are very excited to learn about SearchMonkey.

Effectively, SearchMonkey allows developers and webmasters to affect how their sites appear in SERPs. Of course, this has always been possible through meta description tags, but Yahoo! are now pushing this to the next level.

SearchMonkey allows you to make incredibly visual listings, as illustrated above.

The potential of this is huge for driving qualified traffic – the goal of most SEO work. Would you be more likely to click on a plain, old textual entry, or a visual one with more information?

As a site owner, you have to provide Yahoo! with structured data to create these listings, according to the guidelines laid out here. Once you structure the information as Yahoo! want to see it, you can include user reviews, addresses, phone numbers, prices, photos and smarter page summaries in your listing.

With this and del.icio.us intergration, Yahoo! are giving us a glimpse into their vision of search in the coming years. It will be very interesting to see Google’s response – while they still hold a 90% market share in the UK and much of Europe, advances like this could well threaten the hegemony in the medium to long term. Yahoo!’s market share in the States is still much higher than in Europe – around 20% in April 2008.

Search Engine Optimisation is more than just getting top positions – it is making sure that this visibility converts into visits and sales. We are keeping a close eye on this cheeky SearchMonkey.