Social Media Optimization (SMO) is one of the important ingredients within your SEO and SEM campaigns. Before, social networking sites (like Friendster, Multiply, My Space, Hi5, etc.) were not much more than an oddity. Nowaday, many of them have received highly fair ranking authority from the major search engines. If you are not leveraging these sites to increase your exposure and communicate with your niche consumer, your search engine positions are vulnerable to your competitors. Now, let us describe the current influence of Social Media Optimization on search engine marketing.

Search engine marketing has always relied upon exposure in the search engines to drive targeted traffic. For many years, gaining that exposure was based solely upon the development of your site and generating links pointing to your site. Both are still important today. However, social media optimization has shifted the landscape of search engine marketing. Google once maintained several disparate search platforms for blogs, videos, news, and similar types of “social” content. Each functioned as a separate search engine with its own set of organic listings.

Just a few years ago, Google blended the listings from each platform into a system called Universal Search. Yahoo and Bing have since incorporated similar systems. Universal Search is now used as the primary index. That means blogs, videos, and news have been incorporated into the natural listings, pushing many sites off the first page. This is one of the reasons social media optimization has become a critical piece of search. Another factor that has influenced search marketing is the increased ranking authority given to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, and similar sites. These too, have quickly gained control of a significant amount of search territory

Social media optimization preserves your current natural listings while helping you to gain even more search exposure. By using blogs, videos, and social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, you can capture a greater number of organic positions.