Comments on: What are you optimizing for?

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:30:52 +0000

Well, I certainly did not mean to mischaracterize anything.

By: Nicolette

Nicolette — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:21:15 +0000

Gee Michael, I didn’t know what I love is the “boring” stuff. The analysis and sleuthing are what make SEO fascinating to me.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:09:57 +0000

Well, I agree that “social media optimization” is not clearly defined, but it seems to me that you can achieve optimal performance through social media marketing.

For example, if you’re tracking several dozen social media sites, you can probably figure out which ones are appropriate for an SEO blog, for a business blog, for a news blog, etc. Ensuring you participate in the right social media resources for your site would be, in my opinion, part of the optimization.

Search engine optimization isn’t really very appealing to most people because it requires work. If you can just spend an hour a day submitting your site to “linking sources”, that’s easier — even if the linking sources don’t pass value.

There are plenty of people in the industry who have to do the “boring” stuff — analyzing SERPs, keyword research, looking for ways to improve page optimization, etc.

It’s just that you don’t get as many links to your blog for sharing good information as you do for sharing ideas about how to get links.

By: John H. Gohde

John H. Gohde — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 04:27:47 +0000

Sphinn is about Internet Marketing (IM), yet I see absolutely no one there ever mentioning this fact. I do not think that Social Media Optimization is even possible. I would call it Social Media Marketing (SMM) rather than SMO. What ever you call it, social media manipulation is definitely a part of IM. SMM is positively not SEO. SEO transcends IM, as not all websites are about grubbing money.

I really resent these SMMs and SEMs trying to usurp the title of SEO when what they actually are doing is not remotely connected to SEO.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:08:40 +0000

The point of the post is to get people to think about what they are actually doing. I don't think web marketing will ever be replaced by SEO in the lexicon, but if people are using SEO to refer to more than just search engine optimization they need to be clear about that.

By: skodicious

skodicious — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 15:51:38 +0000

Hi Michael,

I like your fortitude on strictly sticking to SEO. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to add SMO buttons to one’s blog. It doesn’t seem rational to cut off an entire potential avenue of traffic (social media traffic) just because you have a strong affinity to the term, “SEO”. Of course, I can understand why you would leave out SMO on this blog to make a point that the topic is devoted to “Search Engine Optimization” Theory and not “Social Media Optimization.”

It also seems that the definition of the term, “SEO” has morphed over the last few years to mean the general act of web marketing. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with that. I now hear people ask web development companies, “do you do SEO?”–not to say, “do you optimize for search engines?” but “can you get more traffic to my site?”

Thanks for the insight.

By: Michael Martinez

Michael Martinez — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 19:28:28 +0000

Carlos,

This is not about whether social media can affect search results. This is about whether people are focusing on search engine optimization or social media optimization.

If you spend most of your time developing links and content for social media to promote your site, you’re not optimizing for search, you’re optimizing for social media.

Or you could say you are marketing through social media rather than through search.

Relying on social media to optimize your search results is very inefficient and time-consuming.

By: Julian Sutter

Julian Sutter — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 02:47:21 +0000

I think this has a lot to do with the issue of SEO being a FANTASTIC buzzword. The first time I had to tell a client that an aggressive SEO campaign was not worth it for there website, it felt odd. I’d like to think that some of us are in the business of maximizing a websites potential. If this means traffic via Google converting to sales, awesome. If it means making a site “worth telling a friend about” then that’s great too.