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 thing 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.

One of the things that bugs me about Wordpress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

This does not work as nice though with services like YouTube that offer Flash elements. Embedding Flash is a bit more tricky. I’ve found it best to use Safari or a browser that doesn’t do the whole WYSIWYG thing. Then putting in the YouTube code works fine.

If I look back over all the blogs I read, most have photos associated with their posts. Maybe not every day, but quite often. It makes me wonder, do photos increase the number of subscribers to a blog?

If you stop and think about it, there are two kinds of people out there, the analytical/text people and the visual people. There are those than buy the New York Time’s best seller books and those that would prefer a magazine with less reading and more pictures. So, with that in mind, if your blog posts don’t include images, are you just targeting one audience then?

They say “a picture is worth a thousand words” and I couldn’t agree more. If I bring up a website and see happy smiling people, I feel comfortable and welcome. If I see a blog post that includes an Apple logo or an iPod, my eyes are instantly drawn to the post. Images give an instant summary of what the post is about.

With that in mind, I’m going to start inserting more graphics. There are plenty of free image hosting services out there (like Flickr or Zooomr) and all blogs come with an image manager build in. So why the heck not?