We've all heard about Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, but how many of us have heard of Social Media Optimization? I hadn't heard this phrase until this past week. I've spent the past week updating my knowledge on SEO and stumbled across both a video called Going Natural 2 and the related PDF called SMARTS Strategy Guide: Life and Death 2.0 - A Quick and easy Plan for Surviving (and Thriving) in a Social Media World. I'm not sure that this PDF title really sells the content though. After reading it, I'm thinking it should have been called something like "Warning: Contents will radically alter your perceptions of SEO and Social Media!". Because that's what it's done for me. Whatever the title, this 42 page PDF has given me a lot to think about and has pointed me in a whole new direction I didn't even know existed.

Take a look at this graph I grabbed this morning from www.alexa.com.

I compared the daily pageviews over the past year of Google.com (the red line) with twitter.com (bright blue line), youtube.com (gold line), facebook.com (green/teal line), and myspace.com (black line).

Do you see anything interesting? I certainly had some surprises here. First, MySpace is on top. Way out on top in some months, in fact. That really surprised me as I truly expected to see Facebook.com up there. Until yesterday, I didn't have a MySpace page. Now I do. (http://www.myspace.com/clusterwebdesign)

My second surprise was seeing that Google.com is intermingled on the bottom with Twitter.

What I find so surprising about these statistics is that, as a web designer and SEO specialist, the books tell you to concentrate your efforts on making the websites you create - including your own - search engine friendly. And much effort is spent doing just so. The books also tell you that social media, like MySpace and Facebook, are important to your business as well, and they list good reasons to do so, but in my opinion, those good reasons just didn't seem to me to be all that great and worth it.

However, the PDF and video tell a completely different story ... and I finally found my "aha" moment as it related to social media. Now it makes sense!

What I've taken from it is that, you should continue to invest effort into your SEO techniques but in order for you to receive truly great traffic to your site, effort MUST be spent on social media.

In my coming posts, I'm going to expand on HOW you need to incorporate social media into your online existence. Get ready for some exciting information!