SMO for video

In the same way that you optimize your web sites and blogs for the biggest search engines, you also have to optimize watching of your video clips to be found through searches inside social networks and community sites.

It’s like SEO for social network sites. It’s how you make your sites, videos, podcasts, RSS feeds and blog entries more visible and searchable to tens of millions of people who are connected through sites like MySpace, YouTube, Del.icious, Technorati, Reddit, Facebook and dozens of others.

Traditional “connectors” for static sites comprise linking strategies and search engine marketing. Social network “connectors” include use of bookmarks, tags, RSS feeds, trackbacks, reviews, comments, ratings and participation in networked community groups.

The basic of SMO is to increase the chances of your video - or any other portable, sharable content – being distributed more widely and being found more quickly though community search engines. This is important when producing short videos, because it is within and across these networked community sites that video clips are most likely to be distributed and shared.

In other words, to maximize the chances of your video going viral, you have to optimize it for sharing across social network communities.

Let’s say that if you post a video clip to your blog, you will want to increase the chances of the video being widely distributed. The most basic step to take is to add a line of links to relevant social network sites at the end of blog entry (as you can see here at Senserely): small icons of social network sites such as del.icio.us, digg, reddit, furl, ma.gnolia.com, technokrati and others. These links allows people to quickly add your blog entry to the social network or community site or sites to which they belong. Once the post has been added by one person, it will be available to every other member of that community through the site’s search function.