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In case you haven't noticed, social media optimization (SMO) is the new big search marketing term. I think you'll be hearing a lot about it this year and thought I'd give you an easy tip to get started.

First think you need to know is what social media optimization is. Basically, it's just getting exposure and traffic from social media sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace and many others. For a more in depth explanation, check out the new rules for social media optimization.

What I'd like to share with you is one extremely easy way to get some social media exposure. It's as easy as photo sharing.

Using photo sharing sites to host the images you use in your blog posts will give your site added exposure on other sites. Some photo sharing sites to check out include Zooomr, PhotoBucket and Flickr.

Flickr is one of the main photo sharing sites. Once you add your photos, they can be found by not only Flickr but also Technorati, Serph, the Flock web browser, Netvibes and other services that integrate with Flickr. It's a quick and easy way to get in to lots of other sites.

To optimize this exposure, each photo should be linked back to your blog post. Here is a good example that has a link in the description to take you to the related blog post. By adding a basic link, you are driving traffic to your site and creating crawlable links for search engines.

You also need to make sure to tag each photo with a one or two word phrases that the image should be found for. A good title and description never hurt either.

Once you get a few images uploaded and linked, watch your stats and see if you are gaining traffic. You might not get a ton of traffic right away, but any additional visitors are visitors you may not have gotten otherwise.

Plus, buy outsourcing your image hosting, you save on bandwidth. That's another little added bonus.

In the end, social media optimization is the ability to get your site exposure in areas that controlled by people and not by search engine rankings. They give you one more chance of hooking a potential visitor and photo sharing free and easy to do.

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