Sunday, December 20, 2009

The Difference between SEO and SEM

SEM is one of the newer terms within the webmaster world and is quite frequently mixed up with SEO which is completely different. SEM means Search Engine Marketing and is the process of buying top placement or preferred placement from search engines. If you use Google adwords you are using SEM to promote your website. There is nothing really special about this form of marketing and is for those who have a bank account or very little time to perform SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Personally I have no experience with this since I am an SEO expert I have no problem getting traffic through free means. One problem that I have noticed with SEM is lately with some of the search engines it has compromised SEO. Websites such as ask.com place one good listing then 5 sponsored listings then the rest of the actual organic results. Other search engines are better listing fewer and others worse listing up to ten paid listing before the websites who are actually brought up for the terms. Either way SEM is the main form of income for search engines and is not going away anytime soon.

SEO on the other hand is when a webmaster constructs his website in a way which it will perform well in the search engines without having to pay them for first page placement. It is a way in which the rich online and poor are picked since the rich are the ones at top of all the major search engines. This is an internet marketers biggest challenge and is a challenge which is constantly changing and making an internet marketer or SEO expert change their marketing formulas with the changing algorithms. When you begin SEO it will seem overwhelming, but after a year or two of work you will find yourself with the ability to at least gauge the amount of work it takes to reach the top of Google and other major search engines for any given key term. If you have spent this year or so practicing techniques then you should also have a couple presences up on top of Google for at least mildly competitive keywords.

What should the average internet marketer invest in. This is a question which is throughout webmaster forums and a hot topic in debates whether or not buying traffic from search engines rival working hard and reaching the top of Google free of charge. The advice I would offer you is unless you have a $50,000 dollar marketing account and absolutely no time to commit to free marketing then SEM is a viable option. For the rest stick with learning the basics of SEO which you can do by searching Google for free seo tutorial and also signing up for the webmaster forum V7N Forums.

10 comments:

  1. hmmm, tbh Kris I kinda expected better of you. this is the very basics of SEO and SEM, an actual definition would be so much more. merely using adverts is not what SEM is about. - a nice intro to the absolute novice who knows extremely little but your other posts on SEO go so much more in depth than this one.

    Cheers,

    Nick

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  2. this is great to read and yes seo and sem is belonging to each other and seo is like free service but sem is paid service .

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  3. You really think so SAP? I think I will research a little further and provide a deeper post thanks for the input.

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  4. Thanks for explaining the differnces as I am most familiar with SEO. Also I tried your link to the V7N forums link and it doesn't work. Thanks.

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  5. Thank you Alexandra I have fixed the link.

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  6. i can understand why places like ask would favour sem or over organic listings. The trouble with organic listings is that they have typically been slow for new businesses, and hard to get any where now that it's so saturated and there is so many competition that are well established, but sem allows a new business to be first page, but unfortunately it can be at quite a price.

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  7. Interesting article! I would have to say that not all SEM is bought. Most SEM Managers use SEO tactics in their SEM management. SEM and SEO are different but yet you can use the same basic techniques within the two.

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  9. This is a great reading. Thanks for sharing this information.We have few readers who would like to read this stuff. We will pass it on to our readers for more feedback. We are dealing with seo firms and would like to get feedback from you too.This is a nice postings indeed. Thanking You. uk seo firms

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  10. Thanks a lot Kris for defining these two terms..I have to admit, I also often gets confused with these terms...but after reading your post, I can now identify which is which...I'll drop by your site often for more internet marketing tips and ideas.

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