Social Media Optimization or Social Media Marketing has evolved as an important mix for search engine marketing and optimization.

Social Media Optimization, meaning “the process of refining a website (optimizing it) so that it’s awareness and content are easily spread through social mediumsand online communities by users and visitors of the website.”

Social Media Marketing (SMM) combines the goals of internet marketing with social media sites such as Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and many others.

You need to leverage all the links and marketing value you can get from social and business networks. The industry in general is finally beginning to realize the strength of Social Media. And, big brands will begin to adopt Social Media Optimization as a part of their ongoing marketing planning and execution.

Social Media is almost mainstream and it’s no wonder why big brands like Dove are all over it. The challenge for companies who want to play ball in this space is that they cannot control their marketing message.

Social search can never replace search engines as we know them today, but the rate of growth for major search engines will certainly be affected by the growing number of niche tools and media specific channels such as social networks, social bookmarking sites, personalized search, tagging, podcasts, video blogs, regular blogs and other “social media”.

SEO has grown out of it’s mainly technical roots and become more of a creative discipline. There will always be technical issues to solve though, since web sites and servers are technical things. It’s the creative and multi channel aspects of “pull marketing” that are defining the future of SEO.