Social Media Optimization, or SMO, is a new shift in marketing that uses many of the newer technologies available online like aggregation, RSS, social bookmarking, and other ways to help content travel.

SMO, identified by Rohit Bhargava, discusses the many ways to drive traffic back to your web site by increasing the ways in which people can link to your site or pages, rewarding users who contribute, increasing linkability options between topics dicussed, and more.

Lee Odden and others have added to the Social Media Optimization list and I'm sure there will be many more additions in the coming months.

Companies and individuals already taking advantage of resources like MySpace, YouTube, Soulcast, and Flickr already get this new trend in marketing, allowing others to view, share, and even augment their own content on across numerous web sites. This new method of Internet marketing creates the closest thing to "word of mouth" as online marketing has ever seen. YouTube.com is one example, allowing anyone with a site to place a simple link on their own site to display the videos of others.

SMO is becoming the ultimate PR and this kind of marketing will continue to push traditional online PR and SEO out the door, or at least to the back of one's list of agendas when planning to market their site.

The current aggregated list stands at 17 and is as follows:

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices

Thanks to Rohit Bhargava, Lee Odden, Cameron Olthuis, and others for creating this great list of SMO practices.