By SMO we refer to social media optimizations that deploy a number of communities and outlets of social media in order to make publicity and enhance awareness about brand, product or event. Various types of social media include social news, RSS feeds, social networking sites, bookmarking sites. The SMO is similar to search engine optimization or SEO because the main goal of both these technique is to increase the flow online traffic towards a given website.
The social media optimization means optimization of a website and its content for sharing it across networking sites and social media sites. SMO or social media optimization is considered fast and important tools for search engine optimization. The search engine is increasingly making use of the endorsement of online users of social networks like the Twitter, Facebook and Google+ in order to rank the web page in the result pages of search engine. As the web page is liked or shared by an online user on a social network it is regarded as a vote for the quality of the webpage. Therefore the search engine can make use of these votes in order to give ranking to the website on the result pages of search engine.
Although social media optimization is connected with search engine marketing it is different from it in many ways. The main difference is that the SMO concentrate attracting traffic from source apart from search engine. Social media optimization is related with the viral marketing technique and it is regarded as indispensable part of online reputation management. It must also be kept in mind that the social media marketing is not confined to brand building or marketing.