Comparison of Search Engine Optimization(SEO) with Social Media Optimization(SMO):

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Social Media Optimization (SMO) are two of the bigger concerns for webmasters and bloggers, as they can both have substantial impacts on the amount of traffic a website or blog receives. But does optimizing your site for search engines hinder your SMO efforts (and vice versa) or can they co-exist? And what are the similarities and differences between the two?

SEO has been a common activity of website owners for years now. Although search engine optimization still remains largely a mystery to many webmasters and bloggers, its basic concepts have been, and still are, fairly simple. While SEO is no doubt effective, a relatively small number of websites are optimized due to a general lack of knowledge and a high price tag for most professional services. In addition to the cost, SEO is ignored by some because it is difficult to produce immediate results, and real growth in search traffic takes time.

Some Comparisons and Similarities of SEO and SMO:
LinkBuilding:
SEO - Inbound links are a large determining factor in rankings.
SMO - Links are a result of success, which means that SEO benefits from good SMO

On Page Elements:
SEO - Title tags, headers, image title, bold text and use of keywords are all influential on search engine rankings.
SMO - Coding and tags are not so important, while visual attention grabbers make a bigger impact.

Titles:
SEO - The title tag of a page tells the search engines what a page is about and carries a lot of weight in the rankings.
SMO - Titles and headlines are extremely important for grabbing attention and getting users to click-through.

Content Must be Easily Readable:
SEO - By search engine spiders.
SMO - By human readers.

Content:
SEO - Quality content is important in order to rank well.
SMO - Quality content is important in order to hold the readers' attention and win their approval.

Content Plus:
SEO - Content alone will not produce high rankings. The structure of the site must also be sound.
SMO - While quality content is essential, visual presentation can also make a big difference.

Analysis:
SEO - Analysis is necessary in order to know which changes have made an impact (positive or negative) on the site's rankings.
SMO - Analysis is necessary to know what types of content draws interest.

Predictability / the Benefit of Experience:
SEO - Experts are able to reproduce success with new sites (although it's not as easy as it sounds), as the same elements can be applied.
SMO - Those who know the social media audience can recreate success by publishing posts and headlines specifically for this purpose.

SuccessBreedsMore Success:
SEO - Trusted domains will have a positive effect on all pages, including new pages.
SMO - Power profiles on sites like Digg can keep traffic flowing with new submissions.

Social media optimization has only become popular in the past few years as the use of social networking sites has exploded. When compared with successful SEO, social media traffic is less steady. Although those who use social media effectively can consistently draw traffic with newcontent, even the best SMO experts experience large peaks and valleys in terms of traffic. But fortunately, the peaks will be very high.

One of the biggest differences between SEO and SMO is the networking aspect. SMO is heavily-reliant on networking and strong profiles, while SEO can be done without this.

Effective social media optimization (SMO) strategies:(selected overview of 10 SMO activities)

Technical SMO Activities

A. Increase site linkability

• Update your content as often as possible.

• Create sticky content features

- Downloads
- Lists/Rules

• Use catchy headlines and branding

• Follow the permalink conventions

• Many sites are "static" - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media there is a need to increase the linkability of the content - for example, to create a blog, whitepapers, guides, aggregate other content, etc.

B. Easy tagging and bookmarking

• Use quick buttons to let people save your blog to any social bookmarking tool they use.

• Add relevant tags to each blog post so these posts can appear in aggregations listed by ketword on sites like Technorati.

• "Claim' your posts first by bookmarking them in de.l.icio.us

C. Reward inbound links

• Inbound links are very important to a site visibility.

• Creating permalinks, making the comments on the site that links the observed website, linking sites with the inbound links to the observed website, these are very good tactics to increase the number of the inbound links.D. Enable the travel of the content

• It is a paramount to use syndication technology like RSS and ATOM, but the real benefits can be also achieved by submitting the relevant content on niche social media sites (like .avi files on YouTube.com, .ppt files on SlideShare.net, etc.)

E. Encourage the mashup

• Mashup is the term that describes the mixture of different content on the observed Website, using social media technologies (Web 2.0) such as Google Earth, embedded YouTube video, etc.

• The idea is to create the Web site content on the way to be easily mashed up with other content on other Web sites.

• Let others use your content or tools to produce something a bit different or outside of the box with your stuff, even RSS.

Communication SMO Activities

A. Participate (Conversations)

• "Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect.Participating helps your message spread further and faster."

B. Create the usable content

• It does not matter what industry it is about, and what boring products have to be publicized, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will work.

C. Transparency

• It is very easy in online environment to find out who has a real knowledge, and who fakes. For the developing the positive online reputation development of an organization, there is a need to focus on the core competencies, and not to magnify the properties of the products and services that is sold. There is always someone who knows more.

D. Targeted audience

• It is the waste of time to engage in the social media outlet where target audience of observed organization is not present.

• Understand your appeal and those people you wish to attract.

E. SMO in business processes

• To achieve the best results in SMO activities, it is paramount to translate current SMO activities in organization's business processes (related to marketing and/or PR departments of an organization).

Strategy of SMO, How to develop SMO strategy

Define your objectives and set goals. Be fully aware of what your desired outcome is as a result of performing these tactics. Reputation, sales, influence, credibility, charity, traffic/page views, etc.

Social Media Optimization Activities

To implement the online strategy that has the positive online reputation growth as the result, there is a need for an engagement in certain social media activities. Social media activities are executed on the technical and communication level (according to 16 Rules of Social Media Optimization).

Difference between Social Media Optimisation and Social Media Marketing:

Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Social Media Optimisation (SMO) are two of the most popular upcoming 'buzzwords' in the Internet Marketing industry.

To me, Social Media Optimisation (SMO) is the things you can do 'on site' to your website where as Social Media Marketing (SMM) is the things you do off-site. This is slightly different to SEO where it can be done on site and off site. Confused yet?

SMO is a subset of overall SMM just like SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a subject of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). Instead of repeating what has been perfectly said around the web I'm going to quote Cameron Olthius for some great definitions of the two.

Social Media Optimisation

SMO refers to the process of refining a website (optimizing it) so that it's awareness and content are easily spread through social mediums and online communities by users and visitors of the website. This can include anything done "on-page" such as improving the design and usability of the website so that it becomes more compelling to users, in an effort to help them spread it through social media sites. The simplest example of SMO is represented by all the "digg this" and "add to delicious" icons and links that are all over the web today.

Social Media Marketing

SMM on the other hand plays more of an active role in relation to social media by referring to the creation and distribution of content and other messages through the social web by some form of viral marketing. This can be anything from creating compelling content that gets bookmarked and even hits digg's homepage to spreading a viral video by putting it on YouTube and other social media websites. It's about the things that are done off-site, for example, participating in online communities where your customers hang out would be an active role that falls under SMM.

Social Media Optimization - The New Face of Online PR

In the last few years search engine has become an important tool for online business but now a day's Social media optimization is most popular techniques to promote products and services in the market by the mediums of social media book markings.

Social media has become a phenomenon. The number of people becoming a part of this social media is increasing everyday. To us, it means social interaction and exchange of photos, audios and videos. Basically, social media means that people share, anything that they want to share.