Hiya twinkenterprises,
What is the difference between SMO and SEO?
Indeed there are big differences:
1) SMO (social media optimization) - is focused on getting traffic from social networks such as FB, Twitter, LinkedIn as well as many other social networking platforms.
2) SEO (search engine optimization) - is focused on getting traffic from search engines through use of on-page seo and off-page seo with link building etc.
Are there any ways to increase SEO by SMO?
As mentioned social signals do not have a direct influence with ranking a website on the search results. For example Google does not care about the number of FB likes, tweets etc...
The only way it will have an influence on the search results is indirectly as follows: some people may create backlinks - but that typically correlates to large amounts of social traffic which provides great value which in turn influences people to create backlinks on their own websites as a review/resource for their own readers... For example I run a large social media campaign which promotes an awesome page on my website... A visitor sees my social campaign and loves my awesome page and decides wow - I'm going to write about that on my blog which in turn has a link to my page...
Like I said - social signals ONLY have an indirect influence... Google does not use that as a ranking factor... It is best to regards social as a separate source of traffic which does not rely on the SERPs.. and is a good thing wrt diversifying your online business...
Hope that helps!
