Explain briefly SMO?

Wikipedia explains it in detail. Search is your friend :rolleyes:.

SMO is the process of increasing the awareness of a product, brand or event by using a number of social media outlets to generate viral publicity.

The process includes using RSS feeds, social news and bookmarking sites, as well as social media sites and video and blogging sites. SMO is similar to SEO in that the goal is to drive traffic to your Web site.

In terms of the technical aspects of SMO I think it's heading towards collaborative filtering with Google+ and Facebook, but every website and how to optimize for those websites is somewhat different but follows the same principles.

I think Facebook is the leader is social search, collaborative filtering and social sharing, perhaps a year or 2 ahead of Google. They use Edgerank technology which, rates the popularity of statuses and also matches the likes and dislikes of users and groups them together.

To get more exposure on social networks like Facebook, Youtube and Twitter means having more users interact with your content, the more they interact, the more exposure you get.

You will find people optimizing their posts on facebook, so if it is quite a dull topic, you could add a related funny picture just to grab the users attention and improve the CTR and interaction with your content. The more interactions you get then Facebook will automatically adjust your position in a users feed and possibly share that information with other users that have similar interests.

You can then measure this "interaction" using tools that track clicks and conversions such as a short url from Google or Bit.Ly or even Facebook's custom analytics and test the content to see which type has the best peformance. Optimization is improving not simply utilizing.

Similarly you can gain a better ranking in the Facebook search engine by having more likes and interactions so optimizing your applications and Facebook pages using clever marketing techniques will help you to get more exposure through their search engine. Although this is not a fool proof way of organising content, it is quite accurate.

SEO is web based and can have up to 200 different signals to gauge the importance of ranking content. The line between SMO and SEO is becoming very thin.