Social Media Optimization

SMO is definitely a form of search engine marketing and the various SMO rules formulated ensure that huge traffic is driven to the website. Here it needs to be underlined that unlike SEO, SMO relies on more channels (and not just on search engines) to steer traffic.

A rather new concept, SMO necessitates making the best use of social media for website optimization. The original idea behind SMO is to make the websites more popular, more easily traceable in social media searches conducted by custom search engines such as Technorati. There are many ways that you can do it, whether you make use of blogs, podcasts or vlogs, your basic aim should be to make the website easily linkable.

SMO tactics can drive huge amounts of people to a website and can also determine whether a startup, website or idea will make it or not. It involves driving traffic to a website through new channels because search engines aren't the only sites that drive big traffic anymore. While it's not taking over SEO yet, it has the potential to someday soon.

If search engine optimization is about breaking down crawling barriers to help the engines fully index your site, social media optimization is about knocking down site walls so content can be easily found, distributed and shared by the community. This process may simply mean embedding a "Digg This" button on your site blog or it may mean spending hours to create a piece of compelling content, aka linkbait, that could either drive thousands of visitors to your site or have no effect at all.