Online marketing is all about getting noticed and building a brand for your business. SEO or Search Engine Optimization helps your business reach your customers. When customers search for services or a product like yours through a search engine, SEO increases your chances of being found. Your potential customers might notice you, which is good for your business. SEO is the most cost effective way of increasing your business compared to traditional methods of ads, commercials or flyers.

SMO & SEO – An Important Connection

SMO or Social Media Optimization is the optimized use of Social Media such as RSS feeds, blogs, videos, forums, websites such as Twitter, Facebook that enhance the reach of your business. The groups and communities on the Social Media help to generate traffic to your site. It also creates awareness about your business. SMO is sharing contents of the website on social media. SMO is an important part of SEO and is similar to what SEO does.

Both SEO and SMO are very cost effective way of creating publicity and expanding business. However, there are differences too.

Key Differences

• SEO is used to get your business noticed, while SMO is used for marketing your business.
• SEO helps in increasing traffic to your site, while SMO also helps in connecting with your prospective customers. SMO helps in building long and strong customer base.
• SEO is done by selecting keywords and making changes in the title tags, meta description etc of the HTML code. Whereas SMO is used to spread information and awareness via sharing of links, posts, tags, etc on the Social Networking Sites.
• SEO takes a longer time to show results. Whereas SMO is more quick and concrete in terms of results.
• SEO does not connect you to your potential customers but SMO is customer friendly. In the sense that by using SMO, one can connect to customers, share information and even gain feedback.
• SEO focuses on content readable by search engine spiders while SMO focuses on content readable by human readers.
• SEO is very effective with trusted domains and has a positive effect on all pages including the new pages. SMO helps to keep the traffic flowing with new submissions.
• One of the biggest differences between SEO and SMO is the networking aspect. SMO heavily relies on networking and strong profiles, while SEO can be done without this.

Why Implement Both?

SEO and SMO are interlinked. Webpages or links shared and liked on Social Media helps in increasing the rank of the site in SEO. Every like is considered to be a vote and hence improves ranking. SMO is the best way for new websites and blogs to draw visitors. This early success with Social Media can have a long-lasting effect on SEO rankings as well. In all, both SEO and SMO are used to increase traffic, improve site ranking, boost popularity and thereby success of the site. The blend of both SEO and SMO is required to establish and run a successful online business. One needs to judicially strategize effective use of both SEO and SMO. One should take the utmost benefit of online marketing.

About Author 

Emma Searcy is a Search Engine Optimization and Social Media expert. Visit her blogs introsweb.com and searchenginesecrets.com.au to read knowledgeable posts, containing latest Google updates, various tips and tricks to enhance your online visibility.