Monday, August 20, 2012

Differences between SEO and SEM


As with most new technologies, and "mode" comes with it the specter of the acronym. It almost seems that those who are the first to grasp these new trends that will decide her own and develop a whole new language of terms and acronyms in an attempt to obfuscate and confuse newcomers to the subject.

Abbreviations such as' SEO 'have been around for a while' and while many in the industry understand how to 'Search Engine Optimisation' there are still those outside of the web world that does not have the faintest idea what it means. This has not stopped those who work to change the goal posts and even though other terms are too wrapped about 'SEM' or 'Search Engine Marketing'. The system has also obtained professional confused to the point where even seasoned web people do not know the difference and which is not surprising really, because it means virtually the same.

In fact, 'SEM' is probably a preferable term to use because it contains the subject in a more rounded, is probably more important to others outside the industry because almost everyone understands the concept of 'marketing', even if you don ' t know what is happening within the industry.

The impression he gives is a very important term 'Search Engine Optimisation' seems to imply that simply 'optimize' a website and you're done. This is certainly what I heard from many people who have had this service performed on your site and are under the impression that they do not need to do anything else. Unfortunately, this is not the case - the search engine optimization is a long-term process that needs a lot of work to consistently and one-time shots can be almost useless.

Where 'SEO' as the job is not whether you're just talking about a web site and needs to work on it to make sure it is as 'optimized' as possible, ie, does not stop search engines do their thing and indexing it. This term then becomes more about the structure of a website rather than any kind of campaign and there are a certain set of rules that must be respected.

For example, a site can be viewed as 'search engine optimized' if it has a good set of 'title' tags that are optimized for the keywords and description tag also has a good, decent copy and structured, easy to use headers.

Very often this actually be done only once and then maybe when you add new pages, but that's it. However, this does not mean you have great rankings, there's a lot more work involved before they happen.

This is where 'search engine marketing' takes over. You basically need to market your website and as we all know, marketing is a set of actions that will get your product in front of more people and is the same with the web.

Marketing, therefore, can be seen as a set of actions that will allow you to get your site found in search engines and this involves a series of actions that is a bit 'more complex than just changing a little' text of a page.

Marketing, by its very nature, is a deal going and requires much more effort for a longer period of time and when people talk about their campaign 'SEO', are actually talking about 'SEM'.

The means by which Google ranks each particular site over another is a very well guarded secret, but one thing is known - the more links your site is going, it seems it is more popular and hence the higher rank. Therefore the campaign most people will focus the construction of these links. As the competitors will probably do the same, you will find that you need to keep up with too much and it is here that differences in SEM and SEO can be truly appreciated.

So there you go. The differences between SEO and SEM are subtle, but important, however, will find the terms used to explain exactly the same thing and at the end of the day, it all just to make sure your site is at the top of search engines .......

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