Even though these two terms appear similar due to the presence of the word “optimization,” they are pretty different. Many people use them interchangeably even though there are some key differences. One can achieve SEO without SMO. With proper SEO practices, however, one could get some SMO rewards.
Understanding Search Engine Optimization
From the name, SEO involves structuring web content such that it appears earlier on the search engine result page. The idea behind this is evident – get increased traffic, make more sales, increase brand awareness, etc. Many components make up a good SEO process. Some of them are discussed below.
Good Content
This is pretty important as it forms the foundation of your SEO process. You must strive to provide value and essential information to your audience. Your content should be unique (not published anywhere), as plagiarism will shoot you in the leg. The length is also crucial as search engines favor long posts; hence, the longer, the better. A minimum of 500 words is ideal, with no restriction on the maximum length.
Keywords
When people need information online, they type a phrase into Google. These phrases are called keywords. To have good SEO, you should structure your post around such phrases. Ideally, you should have keywords scattered across your articles naturally, and avoid keyword stuffing. This makes it easy to rank in search engines.
Links
This is like a form of an advert for your website. If many people are sharing and linking to your content, Google and other search engines will view you as an authority. This will make it easy for you to rank. You can accomplish this through blog commenting, guest posts, and sponsored posts. This also increases ranking.
Meta Title and Meta Description
Your Meta title is what appears in search engine results. It must include your keywords and define clearly what your business is about. The Meta description is the little text displayed right under the title. It should also contain your keyword and summarizes what the link is about. It must be catchy, as it helps many people decide if your link is worth clicking.
Make Your Site Mobile Friendly
Billions of people across the world access the net via their mobile. As a result, Google and other search engines prioritize mobile optimization in ranking websites. With this, do everything in your capacity to make your site mobile friendly. This is also important to your SEO campaigns.
Social Media Optimization
Also known as SMO, it involves using social media communities to market web content. Popular communities people use are Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. The goal is the same with SEO – to improve traffic, make sales, and establish your authority as a brand.
Some components work together to make social media optimization possible. These are:
Reputation
Before people can trust you enough to share your content and like your post, you need a good reputation. This involves establishing yourself as an authority in the field. You achieve this by creating genuine value that solves people’s problems. This means you must be helpful to people. Interact with them, give their comments a response, etc.
Engagement
To succeed with SMO, you must engage your audience. In other words, do not stop writing content. Get your audience to share, comment, like, critique, and ask for their opinion. Also, you need to make this easy for people to do this. People might easily lose interest in commenting if they have to register. As a result, use existing communities like Facebook, Disqus, Google+, etc.
Use Good Images
If you want to attract someone on social media, you need to put your best foot forward. This is where the images you use, especially your cover image comes in. Your cover image should be excellent and attractive, or it could defeat your goal
Be Smart With Tags
A hashtag is an exciting component of social media. People use hashtags to get exciting and trending ideas on social media. As a result, you must include it in your campaign to reach more audiences. With the right hashtags, it will be easy for people that are interested in what you offer to locate you. Be sure to, however, use the right hashtags.
Optimization
There are many ways to optimize a post for social media. Some of them are:
- Share Button: Add a share button to your profile and make it conspicuous. You can also include the number of shares.
- Social icons: There should be a social media icon (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) displayed conspicuously on your post. This will make it easy to share.
- Make Your Content Shareable: to achieve social media optimization, focus on making your content sharable. Concentrate on infographics, a post like (5 best ways…, five things you do not know about…)
The Key Differences in SEO and SMO
We have explored what SEO and SMO are. And it is clear that both concepts work distinctly to achieve the same purpose.
Furthermore, here are some primal differences between the two concepts.
- SMO employs social media to bring content to the interested and target audience. SEO, on the other hand, uses the ability of the site to rank on the search engine to attract users.
- The process of SEO and SMO requires an On-site and Off-Site process. SMO, on the other hand, is purely an off-site optimization strategy.
- SEO aims to rank using search engines like Google, Yahoo, and others. SMO concentrates on marketing content using Social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc.
Conclusion
While the strategy is different, the goal of both SMO and SEO remains the same. This is to boost traffic in a bid to advance credibility, make sales, and establish yourself as an authority. As seen in the article, the approach to both strategies is pretty different.
If you are successful in your online campaign, both SEO and SMO play a vital role. As a result, it makes it a priority to focus on both. While SMO will help you connect with your target audience on a personal level, SEO helps you remain high in search engine results. This is what you want!
