What are SEO and SEM?
With companies coming out of the woodwork today promising
the moon in terms of better search engine rankings for your website,
it can get confusing to interpret exactly what different promotion
companies are actually offering. Two of the acronyms you hear
most often are SEO and SEM, which stand for Search Engine Optimisation
and Search Engine Marketing, respectively.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the older of the two specialties,
since most search engines did not offer any kind of advanced
paid advertising options until relatively recently. SEO essentially
encompasses anything done to promote your site without paying
for placements, advertising or links. SEO techniques range from
"clean" or "white hat" techniques, such as
keyword targeting your website text and employing proper use
of various html tags (especially headers and "emphasis"
tags for bold and italic text) to highlight important phrases
in your site that potential visitors are searching for. A "white
hat" Search Engine Optimisation campaign might also include
submitting your site to free directories, and requesting links
from other websites.
The other side of SEO encompasses high risk or "black
hat" optimisation techniques that may enable your site to
rank higher than a competing "white hat" site, but
also carry the risk of penalties and outright bans from the search
engines. Such techniques may include using hidden text to boost
the keyword content of your pages, or redirecting highly targeted
"cloaked" sites to your main site when visitors click
on their links in search engine results. Black hat techniques
may be considered necessary for a select few very highly competitive
markets, but the average website owner would do well to avoid
using them.
SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)
Search Engine Marketing, once primarily a matter of buying
banner ads and paying for directory inclusion, has now become
a major specialty industry of its own. Search Engine Marketing
really came into its own when "Pay Per Click" advertising
started to become widespread, first through syndicated PPC search
programs like Overture (now part of Yahoo!) and today through
major search engine PPC services such as Google's AdWords. Pay
Per Click advertising is now a major online industry, and an
excellent way to drive traffic to smaller sites who may not have
the resources to attain top ranking through SEO techniques alone!
A comprehensive SEM campaign will often include detailed PPC
marketing services, where the Search Engine Marketing company
will research optimal key phrases to "buy" through
various Pay Per Click programs, and track your click throughs
and sales for each phrase to better fine tune your ROI for the
campaign. Other popular SEM techniques include paying for directory
listings and buying text link advertising on high ranking and
relevant sites, to not only direct visitors to your website but
to enhance your search engine ranking for the targeted phrases.
As you can see, SEO and SEM may sound similar to the layman,
but what these two areas of specialty cover is actually quite
different. It is vital that you understand exactly what is on
offer before you hire anyone to promote your website online!
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