Online Marketing Blog: Social Media Optimization, SEO &
Web Marketing Strategy

Social Media Optimization (aka: SMO) is a fairly new concept defined by Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide.  The concept of Social Media Optimization makes perfect sense with the emergence of Web 2.0 sites like myspace, digg, del.icio.us, stumbleupon and youtube; and essentially creates additional distribution channels for your web content. The result can mean omnipresence on the Internet.

According to Rohit, SMO is about executing changes to an existing website (or blog) so that your web visitors can easily link to it, tag it, post a comment to it; and/or submit it to their favorite social bookmarking sites.  The result of implementing a Social Media Optimization strategy as a part of your overall marketing mix is more visibility in the social media channel, more exposure on Technorati, inbound links (an SEO strategy that is essential for ranking in Google); and an increase in targeted web traffic.

Speaking of SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

We have been asked by many clients if adopting a Social Media Optimization strategy is an alternative to Search Engine Optimization; and our answer is the same time and time again. Social Media Optimization compliments SEO for a variety of reasons:

• Search engines love blogs because they are constantly updated with fresh new content (assuming you post one to two times per week); and will rank your site extremely well, especially for the long tail keywords
• If you have a blog or any other type of killer content on your website; you will automatically gain inbound links because other’s will want to link to you
• If you make it easy for your content to travel; your content will gain more visibility, links, subscribers and even revenue

The objective of SMO is not about building inbound links to your site, nor is it about increasing your natural search engine rankings; however, if done right, your website can reap these benefits almost instantly.

The Difference between Social Media Optimization and Social Media Marketing

SMO is the process of optimizing a website so that its content can easily travel across the Internet to external, Web 2.0 social and online communities.  The most common example is adding social bookmarks, trackbacks, RSS subscription buttons to a site’s page and/or blog, such as “add to delicious”, “stumble this” or “add to digg”; similar to this blog.

In contrast, I would say that Social Media Marketing is somewhat of a different strategy within the same space; where a company will create compelling content and aggressively target the social media channels (like Myspace, Youtube, Digg, and Stumbleupon) by creating profiles (Nike, Cingular, Jack in the Box, Aquafina), buying media; and engaging in conversations with consumers in places where they frequent. Social Media Marketing can be closely compared to viral marketing; where the content will gain tons of interest, visibility and spread across the Internet like the Ebola Virus.

Technorati Tags: seo, search engine optimization, smo, social media optimization, social media marketing

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 11:25 pm and is filed under SEO, Social Media Optimization, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.