SEM vs SEO | What's the Difference?

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) what is the difference? Well honestly I agree with Wiki on this one, SEO is part of SEM. SEM is basically all the things you do to promote your site, submissions, advertising, SEO, and brand promotion for example. So we have some research already on good SEO minded things to do for your site. Like this SEO hosting guide, Meta title and description optimization, guide to server side SEO, and page mechanics. Now lets get the rest of the story, SEM.........what else can we do?

SEM can mean paid tactics to accomplish conversions and traffic. Keyword bidding, paid results, advertising, and even email campaigns. These approaches can be used effectively with SEO and provide a well rounded campaign. The biggest thing is, in my opinion, SEM cannot be as effective with SEO...but alternately SEO can be effective without SEM. Many times I have seen websites doing large traffic volume and decent PageRank from SEM fail recently, or begin to slide. I suspect the reason is lack of SEO, some of these pages load over 60 seconds, no description tag, all sorts of serious SEO issues. Search as we know it is evolving, paid inclusion is not going away, but I suspect there will soon be higher performance expectations placed on the site for any inclusion. The engines have to deliver relevant, quality, fast results to compete with each other....so they will expect the same from you. I see these high volume paid inclusion sites drop completely from the radar when the run out of money or reduce the PPC (Pay Per Click) investment. This happens because PageRank is not enough to hold SERPs anymore....you NEED SEO.

I think the complete package for good SEM begins with good SEO......you can build a great house, but if it is on a lousy foundation...it will eventually fall down. So start with SEO, use it to build the framework and internal structure that will maximize you SEM and stretch your advertising budget by providing clear clickthroughs, and proper internal linking.

I hope this has been helpful, as always relevant and helpful comments are added to the post with credit.

Peace and SEO

Baby


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