Is Social Media Optimization More Important than SEO?

Posted by Vaibhav

July 25, 2008

Today, with the popularity of social media sites cracking the rooftops across the online industry, people have started questioning the relevance of search engine optimization (SEO) in the current and future scenario. There is no doubt that the two processes are highly distinct from each other, however the final objectives of either is identical.

These objectives can be categorized in terms of attracting traffic, building a strong online identity, enhancing visibility and ensuring profitability. No doubt social media optimization (SMO) is the ‘buzz’ word today, but SEO has been consistently proving its significance over the past several years as well.

So, it’s rather incorrect to completely discard SEO, just because SMO is gaining more attraction and popularity amongst the online masses these days.

To help understand the two processes and their implications better, let’s analyze them in detail:

SEO:

• The content dealt in SEO is more keyword focused. Larger emphasis is laid on attracting search engine spiders to crawl through content that is fed with rich keywords, usually looked for by the online users.

• The process is comparatively slower than SMO, but gives stability to a website if done on a regular basis. Search engines are increasingly becoming a part of internet users, with above 75% of them using the search feature.

• Generating links through link building and link baiting is one of the purposes why good content is given a high priority. Websites or blogs that feature well-written substance help in drawing important inbound links from other websites.

• Ensuring a higher search engine rank is one of the most essential facets of SEO. As known, it mainly focuses on search engines which are popular with the internet audience such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com and AOL.

If we look at the above points carefully, SEO certainly has a huge role to play for growing a website. Considering that it is a white-hat technique, SEO integrates two important aspects of business – ethics and quality. Hence, one can ignore SEO only at his own risk.

SMO:

• This process deals with more of creative and eye-catching content, aimed particularly at human readers than the search engine spiders. The entire focus is on winning the readers confidence and perception.

• It is an excellent way to offer what the reader wants to read, and is much faster than SEO. The huge success of social networking sites like Facebook, Digg, MySpace, etc. has given tremendous scope for marketers to play with their creativity skills in capturing the target audience’s attention.

• The advantage of SMO is that it can draw tremendous traffic at minimum or no cost at all. Also, it allows you to create a strong network with different people who share similar or same interests with you. Here, more than link building, it is link baiting that is given utmost importance.

Therefore, it can be seen that SMO undoubtedly provides huge scope to support website’s promotion. However, a better strategy would lie in integrating both SEO as well as SMO to enhance a website’s prospective.

Social Media Optimization