If you have worked in a corporate environment, you have probably heard this saying: “SEOs can’t be SMOs.” For some reason companies look at SEOs as old school guys whereas SMOs are the new cool experts. However, the notion that SEOs are simply not made to do SMO is nothing but a fallacy. Search engine optimization and social media optimization go hand in hand. In fact, if you know SEO, it will be easier for you to understand the significance of SMO to your online channel. I personally look at SMO as SEO 2.0. They are one and the same.

So we all have heard of SEM, SEA, and SEO. Most of us anyway. But what the heck is SMO? SMO is social media optimization, and it is a pretty recent phenomenon. As Web 2.0 companies started to pop out of nowhere every second, a few smart SEOs decided to invent a new “big bucks” term to keep earning ‘em. Social media optimization is the process of using social networking and tagging sites such as Digg, Reddit, and even YouTube to promote a site. Obviously, you need to have the right message to be able to grab the readers’ attention. Social media optimization can help you in multiple ways. First, it gains you more visibility on the web, and that always helps. In addition, in most cases you get a valuable inbound link back from these social networking sites and that can pretty much help your site with its ranking. Not only that, more people can use the social media to link to your original content, and you reap the benefits of that overtime. But SMO is no rocket science. It is probably not as scientific as search engine optimization or even paid search, but it seems to be almost as valuable these days. That is till Google finds a way to discredit the links that are coming from social media sites.