Just a quick definition so that you know the difference between SEO and SEM.
I talk to fairly sophisticated business people all the time that don’t know the difference between these two terms. It is pretty important to understand these if you have a website for business or any other purpose for that matter.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
It indicates how well your website is optimized with target keywords and phrases so that search engines will find you organically. There is onsite SEO and offsite SEO and both are important. Your webmaster should be in charge of your onsite SEO. They should know what sort of keywords and phrases you would like your website to be found for and they should make sure they have coded that into your title and header tags as well as into the content on your website. Unfortunatly I see a lot of people miss the mark on this one. It is very simple to do and very crucial if you want to be found by the search engines and your target customers. I will explain in a later post how to pick the right keywords.
SEM – Search Engine Marketing
This means getting paid traffic. You are paying the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing to send you traffic. This is also known as PPC or pay per click advertising. Every time someone clicks on your ad you have to pay the search engine. PPC is a great way to get traffic fast but don’t even try this unless you know what you are doing. You can burn your money if you don’t know how to play this game. All of the search engines have tutorials on how to do this properly and this game changes by the day. So either do your homework or hire a pro.
Whenever you search for something in Google all of the listings that come up on the right hand side and the first 2-3 listings at the top are “sponsored search” meaning someone is paying good money for every click they get. Everything on the lefthand side underneath the first 2-3 paid listings is “organic” meaning that person isn’t paying a red cent to have their listing on the front page of Google. Well, they may be paying for some really good SEO work that is absolutely worth it, (more on that later). That is where you want to be.
