ZNewMedia

Rohit Bhaargava who leads the interactive marketing team at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide suggests

“For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site’s performance on organic search listings. While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO). The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily 16) linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more 9) frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

1) Increase your linkability
2) Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3) Reward inbound links
4) Help your content travel
5) Encourage the mashup

Others have added their insights rules:

Jeremiah Owyang has added Rules 6 and 7

6) Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7) Reward helpful and valuable users

Cameron Olthuis has added Rules 8, 9, 10, and 11

Participate
9) Know how to target your audience
10) Create content
11) Be real

Loren Baker has added Rules 12 and 13

12) Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13) Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh

Lee Odden has added Rules 14, 15 and 16

14) Develop a SMO strategy
15) Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16) Make SMO part of your process and best practices

and finally, inspiring a new blog devoted entirely to SMO.