There is a controversial debate between SEO and SMO. Some people are completely sure that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is more effective than SMO (Social Media Optimization). Others are convinced that SEO is in crisis because it is almost impossible to get results from organic search and the only way to succeed is by paying for the search terms used by search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.
On the other hand, many web professionals assume that SMO is having an increasingly prominent role due to the great popularity of social media sites, taking into account that SMO uses networking websites to optimize a website and its content. The fact is that both solutions have similar goals: they were designed to generate traffic to a particular website. They both are great marketing and brand recognition solutions to increase the sales of any company or business with an online presence.
Their differences:
SEO drives traffic from search engines and it works with keywords and the link building strategy, while SMO drives traffic from sources by posting on social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. also including blogs, bookmarking websites etc.
SMO totally depends on social networking sites while SEO can perfectly live without them.
Targeted audiences are different. The person who checks his profile on Facebook is looking for something different from the person who is trying to buy something on the Internet.
With SMO you are able to build a community and to have access to people with similar interests, participating in the same activities that your potential customers are taking part in. With SEO you are trying to sell something and you don’t have that kind of participation and contact with your audience.
However it seems like SEO and SMO are meant to work together. Ironically, SMO are becoming really important for SEO. When social sites users share or “like” a page they increase that webpage´s quality. So, search engines use the recommendations of the social networking sites users to rank websites in the search engine result pages. This strategy has increased the role that social media plays in search engine optimization.
At the end of the day, why should you reject one strategy or another when both of them can work together to increase the traffic and the presence of your site on the Web? Is SEO dead? Is SMO better? The thing is that there is no need to compare when the real sense of online marketing is using as many sources as possible to increase your website traffic. It is time to let differences and discrepancies behind and make a good use of every tool that we have within our reach.
What You Should Know About SEO and SMO