MSO (MySpace Optimization) – The New SEO

Okay, so now that Myspace is the #1 site in the world, I think it’s finally time to embrace the space with a full marketer’s mentality. Despite the Myspace’s title being disputed, it’s hard to argue that there is an incredibly large market with a whole lot of potential. I haven’t dove in wholeheartedly yet, but from my very unscientific experiments on myspace at school there is an extremely high level of loyalty with myspace. My favorite stat is that myspace has 40 pageviews per visitors ON AVERAGE. That was a pretty amazing number to me.

While on vacation, I’ve seen two seperate instances of television ads that used Myspace URLs. I thought this kind of odd at first, but with increasing difficulty to both purchase (and then rank) new domains, it makes pretty good sense. Both the movie “John Tucker Must Die” and the TV show It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia advertise Myspace Urls. This is in addition to thousands of groups dedicated to virally marketing and promoting various different topics, including one of my favorites, Entourage, which attempted a viral campaign via Myspace.

Benefits of My Space Optimization

Quicker Search Engine Rankings
“It’s Always Sunny” didn’t fair so well in the rankings, but “John Tucker” gets a #2 ranking for the phrase on Google with the intended myspace page.

No need for domain or hosting

Immediate audience with massive distribution

Drawbacks of My Space Optimization

No control over web host or downtime

Rather slow servers due to large volumes of traffic

No ownership of content
No ability to 301 traffic or content if it needs to move. If links are built, they can’t be redirected to appropriate areas.

Little way to track statistics and visitors (that I’m aware)

Search rankings are nice, but I really prefer converting traffic. The TRAFFIC is definitely there, now we just need to hope that myspace users start looking for more than friends and dates, and searching for more high dollar items that can be monetized (especially if they implement their own search technology after their search function contract expires). There’s definitely a ton of potential with Myspace, it’s only a matter of getting creative to harness some of the enormous viral marketing opportunities.

MySpace Optimization Resources

• Myspace: Good for more than just hanging out
• Getting to know Myspace
• MySpace gold at MarketingVOX
• Myspace marketing
• My Social Marketing
• Much more on “myspace marketing”