Smo - the New Cousin of SEO

The concept of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has created another of its cousin of the same fray – Social Media Optimization or popularly called SMO. Quite congruent to the SEO process, SMO involves making sure that a website is popular and easily link-able to different media resources like blogs, social bookmarking websites and other media sharing websites. The whole purpose of SMO is to popularize the website in the social circles of the internet and make netizens aware of it.

SEO and SMO, inspite of having their share of differences are quite similar. However, their roles are not interchangeable. Both the concepts are best used in complement to each other. Thus it becomes very important to know and understand the crucial characteristics of each and how and when to use them.

Similarities of SEO and SMO

Here are some common objectives of both Search Engine Optimizations and Social Media Optimization

Link Ability
Linkability determines how linakable your website is in cyberspace i.e. how many people would like to link to your website. If they do not have reason enough to link to your website, then there is no good reason why they should visit you. After all a bad website is as good as no website.

However, do not confuse Linkability with Link bait. Both are two different things. Link bait is the content that you may have on your website to which other sites link automatically because they like it, without your asking. On the other hand linkability is how appealing you can make your website to the members of cyberspace. It depends on content quality, website design and its usability.

Both SEO and SMO strive to increase the linkability factor of a website.

Quality Content
This is a natural consequence of the linkability factor. Good content not only increases the linkability of a website but also gives visitors a reason to come back. And as repeat visitors increase, the credibility of the website goes up.

Pull Marketing
Pull marketing is a tad different from the regular marketing attempts. Quite unlike the latter, the former aims to attract visitors by exhibiting to them the potential value of the website and what they can gain through it. Obviously it scores above and is more effective than blatant advertisement of the website.

Differences of SEO and SMO

Here are the areas of difference of both the SEO and SMO processes:

Channels of Process
SEO is the process of popularizing the website on major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft etc. Thus it follows the principal guidelines dictated by search engines only. SMO, as the name suggests again is all about making the website popular in social circles or media sources of the internet like blogs, forums, online communities, bookmarking websites etc.

Target Users
SEO target users who have something particular in mind. That is because people using search engine have an intention and wish to acquire more information about the same. However, SMO has a wider target audience that mostly consists of savvy net users who don’t mind looking through a good piece of content.

Objectives
SEO try to sell products or services while SMO aims to build a community of like minded users.