What’s the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

If you are into website development, then there is no doubt that you have seen the terms “SEO” and “SEM” quite often. As a matter of fact, it seems that these two concepts factor into your site’s success (or lack thereof) in a major way. For that reason, it is important that you understand each so that you can put them to work for your site. What’s the difference between SEO and SEM? Here are the details:

SEM :  Search Engine Marketing

This is an acronym for “search engine marketing.” There is a multitude of ways you can use Internet resources to market your website, and all of them fall under the umbrella of SEM. Search engine marketing methods include pay per click (PPC) advertising, traditional paid advertising, paid search engine inclusion and spider crawling, and even SEO.

SEO : Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website as viewable and relevant as possible by search engine spiders so that it ranks higher in search engine return results. For example, studies show that most people don’t ever get to page two of search engine results when they are looking for something specific. Therefore, if you want your site to be seen, the higher the ranking, the better.

By optimizing your website for search engines, you are playing to what the search engines want and need to see in order to place a high value on your site (or rank it higher).

Search engine optimization is a complex process that involves many different factors; also, search engine logarithms are constantly being changed and improved upon in order to weed out the quality sites from the low-quality sites, for the purpose of improving the web surfing experience. Therefore, you must stay abreast of the latest in search engine ranking guidelines if your site is to stay optimized.

SEM versus SEO

Here is the Difference Between SEO and SEM. It is safe to say that in order for your website to be successful, you need to have a good SEM plan, and that any good SEM plan includes a comprehensive SEO plan. Therefore, these two concepts are not in competition with each other. They are both factors that contribute to the betterment of your site, and both should be employed.

As you can see, the line between SEO and SEM is blurred. That is because SEM includes SEO, and SEO is not nearly as effective without a strong SEM plan backing it up. Make the most of your website by learning as much as you can about SEM and SEO, and then applying both of them. I hope you understand the Difference Between SEO and SEM.