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In today’s world of Internet Marketing, a bit of confusion and uncertainty seem to shroud two of the hottest buzz words in the industry: SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization).   It seems like companies both large and small are doing anything and everything in their power to make sure they are doing SEO and SMO, but in the end do they really know what they’re doing?

SEO is a process that has been around for over a decade. It involves optimizing your website through various methods and tactics that “naturally” increase its rankings on search engine results pages. This is one of the more prevalent methods of Internet Marketing, considering there are literally billions of searches per day on Google alone.

SMO is a fairly new practice; it involves the optimization of all social media or networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. As the popularity of these social outlets continues to increase, so does the general feeling that a company must have a strong (optimized) social presence to support any sort of marketing they may want to do. A strong presence is created by building up the number of followers on a social networking page, and actually engaging and interacting with them to the point where they want to stay up to date with your current events.

Of course, a question will arise: which one is more important? It sounds like such a simple question, but in reality it is quite the opposite.  The two should actually go hand-in-hand. Believe it or not, SMO actually plays a big part in SEO. SEO provides long-term growth and potential, but with a properly executed SMO plan, customers can continually keep track of everything you have going on without solely having to rely on search engines. It should not be mistaken as a substitute for SEO, but rather another powerful marketing tool that adds to your online presence and brand recognition while driving targeted traffic to your website, just like other practices such as pay per click advertising.