New methods are implemented by each company to increase the ranking of a website on a search engine. Search Engine Optimization is maturing with time and is now taking the help of social networking sites to increase its attraction for web users. Sites, whether new or old, have become more interactive and a web user can connect to most sites via social networking sites. Social Media Optimization has become one of the core ingredients for Search Engine Optimization. SMO does not get direct rankings for the selected keywords but help indirectly by getting focused and targeted traffic to the website and thus helping the websites to get more mileage from the Search Engines which in turn helps in getting the needed rankings. Social networking sites help in searching the target audience and increase the interaction of users with the site.

A site can now increase its popularity because of word of mouth publicity. For Example: If a user likes a particular site then he would recommend that site to his friends on social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut or Twitter. This leads to an increase in the number of users and the site reaches out to new users as well as old users and is more accessible to the target audience.

Social networking sites can also be called PR sites, as they give a website the opportunity to mention all its details on its pages and create blogs as well as forums. These blogs and forums need to be updated regularly and the users of social networking sites become regular visitors of the site. Companies that want to increase their users have to be connected to a social networking site as it is an integral part of the online business-marketing scheme. There are many companies that run their own blogs and forums on social networking sites as these sites allow users to get not only the required information but also information that is correct and reliable.

A user can bookmark the site and share the information of the site with other users. Bookmarked sites have a higher viewership on the Internet. People who view the site can also rank the site and this helps in increasing the popularity of the site. Bookmarking helps in building up the back links for which an SEO optimizer can be employed. Social networking sites also give a company the platform to promote their website for free by pasting the URL of their home page on the profile. If the company has an employee base of 20, and all the employees have the URL of the home page of the company’s website mentioned in their profile then the ranking of the site increases automatically. A company can easily reach out to hundreds of users within a short span of time. As the company URL is clicked by a chain of friends of each employee, this increases the target audience and thus gives the site better visibility on the search engine. It is important that the site is promoted with proper planning on a social networking site as sometimes it can also bring negative publicity to the site.

We can see that even though the organic SEO techniques still prevail the newer SMO techniques if used can get exponential growth to the website in terms of traffic coming to the website and a chance of getting quality business leads.