SMO against SEO. Pluses and minuses.

Anyone who has even dabbled in the creation and promotion of a site knows about SEO optimization. But few have heard of such a direction of online marketing as SMO (from Social Media Optimization).

The essence of the SMO optimization is to create a set of measures aimed at attracting people to the site from certain social networking (blogging, forums, blogs, etc.).

For the first time this term was formulated Rogit Bhargava in his article, released in summer 2006. In it he formulated the 5 main principles SMO optimization. According to the principles Bargavy SMO optimizer must:

1. Constantly improve your link popularity site.
2. Try as easy as possible to add content to users from the site directly to the blogs (or other social networks) by rss-channels and bookmarks.
3. Continuing to attract inbound links.
4. Permanently stimulate the export of content site with links to the source.
5. Introduce services that distribute content.

Later the list of unspoken rules SMO optimization has been greatly expanded labor bloggers and Web masters. Yet SMO is still young and undeveloped area of Internet marketing. Not all SEOs understand correctly, what is fundamentally different SMO optimization SEO. The main difference of SMO is to use these tools to promote your site as: social networks, community interest, “viral” content, blogosphere, etc.

Has long been known that the main drawback SEO optimization that contact with the audience through search engines, which act as a certain broker. Man, however, is being optimized, in fact, can not in any way change the text that users see in search results. When SMO optimization contact with visitors is in the mode of dialogue without any intermediaries. The site offers some content to familiarize users to learn their opinion of what is called directly.

If the development plan for the site is designed correctly, users are engaged in the promotion of your website yourself, using their own resources. Simply put, the optimizers make the calculation that if the content of the website is really interested user, he wants to put his (or fully or partially) in his blog. People who visit this blog always see your stuff, and likely will place it already in their blogs and so forth. Thus the effect triggered “word of mouth”, and the content starts to continue to extend themselves, like “virus”, from one user to another.

Unlike SEO optimization, where to put a one-time attracting users to the site, SMO optimization aims to convey to people a kind of advertising message. It is known that most users will have extremely negative attitude to any manifestations of covert advertising. For this reason, PR in social networks should be as open to its visitors. Simply put, the visitor must be prepared to receive promotional messages in return for timely and interesting information. Important is the fact that users of social networks spend an average of sites 2-3 times longer than users who came to the site through search engines.

This is explained by the fact that people, attracted by SMO is on a site with a predetermined interest based on the recommendations of an opinion leader or a certain social network. (Digg, Twitter, Facebook etc.) The main advantage of SMO to SEO is its versatility as a method. In fact, very few areas for which the use of SMO optimization method proved to be ineffective.

The main drawback is SMO optimization, compared with SEO is its labor-intensive, which was particularly badly affected by the deficit of specialists.

Summing up, all the above can be summarized as follows:

- Range of application SMO optimization times greater than SEO
- SMO provides direct contact with the audience
- Tools SMO is several times greater than for SEO