Interchanges.com believes SMO is not a paradigm shift away from the Search Engine Optimization process, but rather a method making a site more easily linked to, increasing it’s visibility in social media searches on custom search engines, and more commonly included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs. A basic SMO approach is to add buttons to bookmark pages at ‘del.icio.us’ or ‘furl’, to ‘digg this article’, to share on ‘Facebook’, etc.

But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Users, unlike web crawlers, can be easily put off with shameless self promotion. So finding the right balance when it comes to adding links is essential to building brand recognition and improving overall site visibility. SMO can be considered an advanced form of word to word and viral marketing using social networks. SMO is tricky because there is no general course of action, since current trends and fads, new concepts as well as user’s fickleness factors into the process. Interchanges.com branding processes includes SMO as a key component.