What is SMO?

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds, social news buttons, blogging, and incorporating third-party community functionalities like images and videos. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.
Social media optimization is in many ways connected as a technique to viral marketing where word of mouth is created not through friends or family but through the use of networking in social bookmarking, video and photo sharing websites. In a similar way the engagement with blogs achieves the same by sharing content through the use of RSS in the blogsphere and special blog search engines.

What are Social Media Websites?

First, what is social media? The quintessential social media site is myspace. Myspace is completely user generated, in other words, all the content comes not from some mega corporation, but the users themselves. Other examples of social media sites are Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, and Squidoo. Basically, a social media site creates a community of people with similar interests, and allows them to network and communicate on any given topic.