Is SMO the New SEO? The Future of SEO Through Social Media Optimization
Traditional search engine optimization techniques have focused on changing a website’s coding and content to target specific placement in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. As long as search engines remain the primary road people use to locate information on the web, then SEO owns a secure place as a relevant industry on the web.
Search engines are the Yellow Pages of the internet. It used to be if you wanted to find someone who sold widgets, you would look for a store in the Yellow Pages. Now millions of people turn to search engines first, but search engines still operate under the Yellow Pages mentality; to find widgets through a search engine you still must flip through a few pages, it’s just done electronically. The Yellow Pages are online now too, still operating under the old mentality.
Word of Mouth
Long before the Yellow Pages were first published people found out about widget stores through word of mouth. If you wanted to find the best widgets, you asked a friend where they bought theirs. But as the world grew bigger and faster, word of mouth couldn’t keep up. It became quicker and easier to look in the Yellow Pages.
But the Internet is making the world small again and word of mouth is reclaiming a practical edge. Search engines can be manipulated, they’re not necessarily dominated by the best sites, and you’re visiting a site without knowing if it is reliable. Just as importantly, you might have to wade through a few websites to find exactly what you wanted and these days that’s too slow. In contrast, if someone you have even a cursory relationship with tells you a website is reliable, then you’ve just saved the time and trouble of finding one on your own.
Human Search Engines
People have become the new search engines, indexing and categorizing websites with an intricacy search bots could never replicate.
Search engine optimization has long been considered an essential part of marketing for any website. Traffic from search engines is free and therefore competitive, and its competitive nature has spawned the search engine optimization industry. But as people return to word of mouth through sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, or any among the multitude of social bookmarking websites, will SEO loose its relevance?
Sites Are SEO Out of the Box
Search engine optimized websites are quickly becoming a commodity. Any number of content management systems can quickly be implemented to build a variety of websites and most of them are fairly search engine friendly right out of the box. Any of their SEO shortcomings are fairly easy to fix. Even if search engines remain the primary means of finding information on the web, how much SEO training does the average blogger or webmaster really need anymore?
The focus of SEO already seems to be moving from technical concerns to the manipulation of content. But as long as SEO chains itself to optimization for search engines and their search bots, SEO practitioners and the related industry are placing their bets on what could be a dying horse.
Dueling Acronyms
Rohit Bhargava has been credited with coining the term “SMO”, but this hasn’t matched “SEO” in familiarity. SMO is generally regarded as a child category of SEO and SEM, but is it positioned to inherit the farm? And do we really need another acronym?
It seems to me if SEO is to survive it has to embrace the concept of SMO. If Google, Yahoo, and MSN recognize social media as an emerging new guard, and their involvement with MyBlogLog and YouTube seems to indicate they do, then as an industry which caters to search engines SEO might be wise to do the same. But instead of turning to new acronyms and printing new t-shirts why not use what’s already in place?
Couldn’t SEO evolve as well and someday be thought of as “Social Engine Optimization”?
A Rose by Any Other Name
Whatever you choose to call it, bloggers and webmasters who choose to ignore social media are choosing to live in obscurity. Sites that put all their eggs in the search engine basket subject themselves to periodic egg smashings; they are placing their future in the hands of a powerful few. Those who put some of their eggs in the social media basket not only acknowledge and encourage the web’s human element, but they serve a more predictable master.
As I write this, the blog you’re reading just turned two months old. More than 500 people have subscribed to the RSS, there have been more than 95,000 unique visitors (almost 190,000 page views), and one post has made it to the front page of Delicious. Although it’s placing well in the search engines for its targeted keywords, search engine traffic accounts for less than .1% of our traffic to date. The lion’s share of traffic has come through social media.
Same Rules, Different Game
As search engines come closer to replicating human judgment, their rules are becoming strikingly similar to those of social media. It’s increasingly about content and scanability. It’s not about how many keywords you put in an article, but how you use them.
So if the rules are the same, social media is the Internet’s heir apparent, and you don’t even have to print new t-shirts (”search engine” and “social engine” share the same monogram), doesn’t it make sense for SEO to court a new master?
10 comments
Best practices of SEO has always been about making content that human readers will want to see in search results.
The tweaks change, but building stuff worth finding is best. Sooner or later, all the tricks are caught.
After my initial period of weeding out thing that don’t work SEO for me was (and is) always about building enough backlinks. And taken in this context, SMO is just a part of my backlinking strategy, which does not bring any quality traffic all by itself… Your mileage may wary of course
Misha
Mapquest Driving Directions
Misha,
I’ve heard the argument that social media sites do not bring quality traffic, but I wonder if the traffic is just more picky. In reality, SEONoobs is largely built on traffic from social sites. I’m not rejecting the social traffic, but instead am working to make my site more appealing to it.
I think SMO is valuable for clients that have blogs on their websites and not so much for those who don’t. Many small business owners are slow to put up blogs since they are stretched thin for time as it is. The one’s I’ve been able to convince to put up a blog and do SMO on them have been happy with the results. I see SMO as evolving to be on par with SEO and SEM. Some companies will offer all three and some will just specialize in only one of these endeavors.
I love the concept of social media sites. The only drawback is having to deal with unbalanced personalities intermittently. It’s a great way to form contacts with nice people but BEWARE the psychotic and semi-psychotic.
Brennan Kingsland’s last blog post..Teens, STDs & Consequences
SMO is a widely misconceived term.
I’d prefer sticking to the acronym SMM ( Social Media Marketing ) which probably makes more sense.
There’s no need to “optimize” for social media - people just need to have a more holistic approach.
Social Media Marketing doesn’t mean the end of Search Marketing, its just that Social Media is going to empower Search Marketing!
Ashwin’s last blog post..Reserve your Social Media Identity Before you Lose It!
Yesterday I spoke to a client who is spending $45,000 a month on PPC using Adwords, MSN, and Yahoo Search Marketing.
That’s a LOT of money. He wasn’t doing or really even aware of the traffic possibilities using social sites.
It is the wild wolly frontier all over again.
Oh, I stumbled ya!
Rick
@Brennan: I heard about your experience with the StumbleUpon “purist”. I guess there are unbalanced personalities everywhere, but it’s the nicer people like yourself and many of the readers here who make it all worthwhile.
@Ashwin: I don’t think it matters which acronym you use, just that you do use social media. I disagree when you say there is no reason to optimize; optimizing doesn’t just mean tweaking your site’s code.
But there is some code to tweak anyway; you will do best if you make it easy for people to bookmark your pages, and that requires code. But other than that, there is the need for visual optimization. I’ve heard people say traffic from social sites is worthless, but if you have good information people actually want, and it’s presented in a logical and attractive manner, social traffic is quite valuable. And all these things are social media optimization.
Social Media Marketing isn’t what I was talking about; that is something entirely different. As far as SMM, I agree with what you say, the approach might be best if it’s organic.
@Rick: Thank you so much for the stumble! I like the way you painted the scene as the wild woolly frontier revisited. That really captures it; in some ways right now it’s a free-for-all just like the old wild west.
I agree with Misha that is SMO is just another form of back link strategy. Realistically, whether Digg, Stumble Upon or Delicious, the objective is to get the website in the eyes of the potential customer. Initially I really did not like being known as a search engine optimisation consultant, the term Seo is just limiting and as we all know there is a lot more to it than that. Also on a personal note, it certainly seems that clients are far too busy developing their business strategies, buying and selling etc and will always need individuals to support their online marketing efforts. In my opinion keeping up to date with the latest trends, ideas concepts etc will keep us secure in our marketing world.
Brandon Sandler’s last blog post..Reciprocal Link Building
Brandon: While social media does provide the opportunity for backlinks, what’s important is getting people to follow those links and stick around once they arrive. That requires site optimization.
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