SMO – Social Media Optimization

This past week I have been doing a lot of research on SMO. SMO stands for Social Media Optimization. It contains a lot of the newer sites out there that are often times referred to as the Web 2.0 sites and technology. There are some major advantages to it that I can see, but form your own opinion. Many SEOers don’t like this term. Even our main resident SEO expert refers on his personal SEO Blog that he has some issues with the term SMO. But from the research I have done and the experience that I have with the internet I will describe it best that I can in as positive as a light as I can.

First thing that we need to do is the look at SEO vs. SMO. Of course naturally SMO will help you with your SEO and we should practice both. Based on what I’m about to say, you can make the decision on what strategy you would like to focus your efforts the most on.

We have all used Google, MSN, Yahoo, and all the good old Search Engines out there. Their results and the way they judge sites continually have to be changing. Spammers and SEOers figure out ways to cheat and ways to water down the results. Don’t get me wrong, not every person with a gun is using it for wrong, but a lot of SEOers are probably the ones polluting the internet making it harder and harder to find what you’re looking for and making the quality of content and sites worse and worse. It’s not Google’s fault that there are way too many low quality sites out there, it’s ours. Search Engines base a lot of their results on algorithms they don’t know any better. You can’t tell me a computer program can think about content and how good or bad it is. It can only count characters, words, and look at statistics. Tell me you come up with lots of good content and no garbage. You can’t can you! Well there is always going to be garbage but the key is to pick it up and throw it away. With a search engine that is hard to do.

With SMO, it’s major focus is a user decided content system. Content is displayed based on how many people bookmark, vote, digg. One unique aspect of Digg is that you can bury stories, or pick up the garbage and put it where it belongs. For some reason I feel like I’m going to come up with better results if individuals managing what is quality and what isn’t. It’s almost an online check and balance system. Submit your story to Digg 7 times a week and you’ll get what I mean. Since SMO is a lot newer than the traditional search engine, there is still a lot of opportunity. One duty that we have is to spread it’s use. This will help bring more sites to these communities and constantly create fresh new, good content.

There’s nothing worse than having to jump through hoops. How many hoops are the search engines holding up? You’ve got sandboxes, density, meta tags, number of words, even how long you have been on the internet. Good content is good content! Guess what, if I made a movie I don’t want two rich guys that have lost touch with the true reality of the average Joe telling me if it was good or not. Wouldn’t you want the audience that you created it for. You’ll get better feedback and have a whole lot more word of mouth. 2 people cannot say it all. It takes a community to build a successful website. The social community is so intertwined that one community can’t help but to spill over to the other.

So what do you think? SEO or SMO. What would your first choice be?

Next time you need to search for something, give Del.icio.us a try and see if you find anything good. I’m sold.