Maybe you would not have heard the name of Mark Zuckerberg some years ago but now this person has been chosen as the Person of the Year (2010) by Time Magazine. Yes, he is the creator of social networking site Facebook. It has registered over 500 millions users from all over the world and now has become an essential part of the social media optimization (SMO). Actually the term SMO refers to the development of the content related to different incidents and readers’ interests that keep people engaged. So the search engine optimizers find it a very productive medium for the promotion of websites that can easily make access to the target people.

Like Facebook, there are some other social networking sites such as MySpace, Twitter, Digg, Flickr, Friendster, YouTube, Squidoo, etc. These sites have given a very efficacious option for the promotion of websites through social mediums and online communities. It is proving to be a good methodology of search engine activity with the intention of attracting online visitors to the business websites. They give an easy option to optimize websites because millions of online users are connected or interlaced with online communities. This is a platform using which you can directly chat with the users or showcase your products or services in order to attract their attention.

Many people question why should we include SMO services in SEO? It is very easy to draw a close parallel line between these two activities. The social media optimization targets the traffic from social media sites, whereas SEO is taken for the improvement of chances of achieving search engine traffic. So there is a very positive contribution of SMO because its contents help in enhancing the search engine rankings as well as traffic to the website. Furthermore, SMO has become an integral part of website’s search engine reputation management (SERM). SEO companies integrate SMO to achieve the goal of online marketing and brand building.