Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a fast growing website optimization method, which is indeed related to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but differs in numerous ways.

SEO primarily focuses on driving traffic through search engines for improved rankings, creating search engine and user friendly keyword rich content, and practicing link building for targeted keywords and phrases.

SMO, on the other hand, is a method of generating online publicity and credibility through social networking and community websites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Linkdln, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube. It is an effective but time consuming way of website promotion. Methods used in SMO includes blogging, participating in discussion boards and forums, adding RSS feeds, social bookmarking, and incorporating images and videos of third parties. Content is the major strength of SMO, that’s why it primarily aims at popularizing the user created content on the dynamic and easily accessible online communities and networking websites. A good content will definitely appeal to the masses and will increase traffic exponentially.

You can measure success of your SMO efforts through the following indicators:

• Count of content viewed and positive ratings
• Count of widgets embedded on other websites and blogs
• Count of members joined your community
• Count of positive listings of your product in search engine results

Like other optimization methods, Social Media Optimization also has some golden rules, such as enhancing linkability to your website, developing and promoting widgets and RSS feeds, encouraging and rewarding incoming links, making bookmarking and tagging easily available in the content, participating actively on networking websites and commenting genuinely on community portals, and most importantly, practicing and monitoring SMO closely on your website.

Hence, the conclusion is that SMO simply complements the SEO efforts.