What is the Difference Between SEO and SMO?

SEO and SMO, are common terms in Social Media Marketing, but do we know what they mean? Well to start off, social media marketing is all about producing content that users will want to on their different social media accounts and this essentially helps companies or businesses increase brand awareness.

So, in order to be successful in social media marketing, some strategies should be considered. These strategies include SEO (search engine optimization) and SMO (social media optimization).

What exactly is SEO?

SEO is pretty much a set of strategies and techniques to help improve your search engine rankings so that more users see your site.

Many marketers develop and publish content in a certain way so that their content appears high in the search engine.

There are several ways one can increase exposure of a brand.

On-Site Optimization

Keywords: words that are embedded on the site itself, these keywords are read through the spider (or web crawler), which is an automated web program that gathers information from different sites. Once this information is gathered, the search engine will determine which sites are the most relevant to the user’s search query.

These keywords include:

• Meta tag: this is text that is only seen when viewing the source code page; it describes the page’s content. For example, the meta description should include keywords that will help users find your site, this description should be about 2-3 sentences and this also appears as the description with the search engine listing. 
• Title Tag: this is the title that appears at the top of the browser title bar and on search engine results. 
• Heading Tag: heading tags are classified ad H1, H2, H3, etc., with H1 being the bigger text in size, indicating that it is a more important heading. These heading are of course used to differentiate the different section of your site and/or titles of different sections. There should be different keywords in these headings.
• URL: a good URL will be static, meaning it will always stay the same and it should include keywords.

What is SMO?

SMO is a process of increasing brand awareness thorough different social media platforms. If the content that is published is relevant and engaging, other sites might link to the content and will lead to users to share that information.  SMO is more focused on encouraging others to share content, whereas SEO is more about finding ways to rank high on a search engine query. SMO can help improve the search engine ranking because there are many links involved in SMO, and that is what the web crawlers like.

In order for others to share content, the content should be entertaining, valuable, or interesting.
Here are some things to consider;

On-Site Tactics

Title: the title is very important, as is it the first impression; the title determines if the user will even take a look at your content.

There are different types of “hooks” that can be considered when coming up with a title

• Resource hook: this hook should be used for content that is meant to help the target audience.  For example, “10 Ways to Increase User Engagement”
• Contrary hook: this hook generated debate and allows for users to express opinions. For example, “Reasons Why PPC is better than SEO”
• Humor hook: this one is a given, most people enjoy humor if used in the correct context. 
• Giveaway hook: this hook includes a sales promotion and an incentive, such as a discount. 
• Research hook: this last hook offers some type of claim, can be some statistics that entice interest. 

Share Tools

When there are call to action buttons, such as sharing buttons, users are more likely to share that content, simply because it is easier. The share buttons can be linked to different social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin.

I hope you now have an understanding of the differences on SEO and SMO!