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The SEO industry walks the proverbial tight rope every day, offering legitimate services to clients that can help them interact better with search engines, while at the same time dodging the stigma that SEO is merely spam tactics cleverly disguised using smoke and mirrors.

The reason that search engine optimization is garnering a negative reputation, however, may actually have more to do with shady social media optimization practices than anything else.

Yes, I’ve criticized the Digg community quite openly about the blanket attitude of their users toward SEO, and the tactics they have employed to bury stories and ban URLs that submit content related to SEO. It’s an extreme response to be sure, and one I’m not altogether pleased with.

However, as SMO firms continue to spam social media sites with a flood of keyword heavy posts with tons of links, it’s only reasonable to assume that the community might start to feel a little misplaced resentment toward SEO as a whole.

Jason Calacanis talks about what he feels comprises good SEO:There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don't consider them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means "gaming the system" to 90% of us.

Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it you're gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don't smoke the SEO-crack... you'll just wind up chasing your tail as digg and Google closes the tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.

Jason’s view might be a somewhat simplistic in its nature, but it’s one that is shared by a great number of people across the scope of the Internet.

The problem is that most people don’t differentiate SEO from SMO at all. They see it all as the same industry, which is not entirely accurate. Sure, both practices have the end focus of improving a site’s rankings within the search engines, but there are some subtle differences when it comes to implementation.

Greg Boser, a search marketing consultant writing at WebGuerilla, elaborates on the semantics:Since SEM/SEO is where I spend the majority of my time, I’ll take responsibility for the guy who auto posts to 50,000 abandoned blogs with the anchor text “Buy Viagra”. He’s an SEO spammer because his actions have the potential to directly impact how a site ranks in a search engine for a specific phrase.

However, I won’t take responsibility for the people who spend their day posting crap on Digg (on behalf of a client) that rarely produces anything more that a short-term flood of traffic, and almost never has any direct impact in terms of helping a site rank for prominent phrases that people are actually typing into the little white box.

That’s not an SEO Spammer. That’s a Social Media Spammer. Accept that fact and move on.

So, the next time you’re surfing your favorite social media site and you come across posts that can be clearly identified as feeble link-building attempts, think twice about raising your fist to the heavens in anger and cursing the SEO industry for its spammy practices.

Blame the social media spammers instead.

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