SEO or SMO? Or Why Not Both?
by Yolandi on 03/11/09 at 12:08 pm
3 comments
Social Media Optimization, or SMO, has only started attracting attention in the past few years as the use of social networking sites boomed. With this new acclaimed popularity, lots of questions have started popping up about the relationship between SEO and SMO.
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) helps boost your ranking in search engines and so, guide more traffic towards your website. To single out your company’s website from the mass of information on the web, it is vital to make use Search Engine Optimization. Said differently, search engine optimization aims to make your website appear in the first pages of a search engine, if not the very first page of specific searches.
What is SMO?
Social Media Optimization is a term used to describe how popular your website is from attracting visiters from social media platforms such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter or Flikr. Basically, SMO is all about driving traffic from social media sites or blogs to your website. So, when social networks are used efficiently, they are able to guide more traffic to your website and convert visitors into a steady flow of loyal customers.
We can see that both SEO and SMO are tools to increase traffic towards your site. The question that still lingers is which one should you use, if not both? Let’s look at a quick comparison of the two:
1. Both depend on links. In a post I wrote on SEO for The Heavy Chef Blog I asked Mike Perk, Co-founder of the energetic web marketing company World Wide Creative, what the most important thing is when using SEO. Mike pointed out how important relevant links are that point back to your site. Mike explained linking in Google terms: “Google is looking for the centre of authority on a particular topic or search term. It does this by looking at where all the links point to and seeing which are the most relevant to that topic/search term. That’s the one that goes to the top.” Some of the keys to linkability for both SEO and SMO are: content, design and usability. Also, pages and sites that are popular with major social media sites will usually receive lots of inbound links. These links are then a direct result of SMO and will have a positive impact on your search engine ranking.
2. Furthermore, both depend on good content. As mentioned above, good content and linkability are ‘linked’ (excuse the pun). For SMO it’s important to provide your readers with valuable content that interests them and in return, helps you build trust and credibility with them. For SEO, good content and the use of keywords will catch the eye of search engine spiders and will increase your ranking.
Also, Social Media Optimization attracts traffic through effective relationship building while Search Engine Optimization increases visibility on search engines with keyword ranking. When using SMO successfully it will affect your SEO. The more readers start linking your site or your posts, the more search engine spiders will pick it up and increase your ranking.
Now, you should consider mixing Social Media Optimization techniques alongside with SEO to achieve higher ranking and capture your audience’s attention. Together SEO and SMO set a “power punch” for building your brand and increasing your brands visibility online. Some people prefer SMO over SEO but most believe in a healthy mix of both. I think you should use all available resources to optimize your presence on the web and that means incorporating both SMO and SEO into your marketing strategy.
Yolandi Janse van Rensburg writes about social media, marketing, life and, of course, cars. We say “of course” because Yolandi is nuts about anything on 4 wheels. Besides moonlighting as the Heavy Chef girl at World Wide Creative, Yolandi runs Autofemme, a blog about cars, as a business on the side. View more articles by Yolandi.
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Tags: seo
Gerhard Pieterse
Nov 3rd, 2009
Cool post, you have clarified what I thought I understood.
SEO Wanna Be
Nov 4th, 2009
Hi your post is amazing, It’s incredible, I learned a lot about SEO and Man, this thing’s getting better and better as I learn more about internet marketing. Also as part of my ongoing mission to find the absolute best tools to make money, this is without a doubt at the top of my list. Everything happened so fast!
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