We get a lot of questions regarding differences and benefits of SEO and SEM. To most people, these terms are synonyms. They even sound suspiciously similar – search engine optimization and search engine marketing. But don’t be fooled by this, because they are quite different in nature. Each one has its own distinctive benefits and good webmaster will employ both to increase his or her site’s earnings.
Search engine optimization is a process designed to increase your site’s organic search engines ranking by clever use of keywords. Some of the key components of this process are quality content, backlinks building, keywords integration into meta and title tags, and search engine and directory submissions. SEO provides natural traffic to your site by increasing search engines’ rank. The higher the position on the search engine result page (SERP), the more people searching for your keywords will visit your site.
Search engine marketing, on the other hand, consists of number of procedures that employ classic marketing tactics. These are:
Paid inclusions – Basically, you pay search engines to include your site on top of the SERP for given keywords.
PPC Advertising – Pay-Per-Click ads are very popular with advertisers because they can control the whole campaign. There are text only add and you can control what keywords will trigger them what will they say and how much you want to spend. You will only be charged for ads that get clicked.
Traditional Ads – These are not so popular, since they are paid per impression or the number of times they showed up. This means that you can spend a hefty amount of money and not gain a single visitor from them.
The key difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO can be done for free, if you know how. SEM cannot. That is why SEO if most popular strategy with small and start up sites, while SEM is mostly conducted by wealthy and established companies. SEO is also a bit more unpredictable, since it is based on search engine algorithms and because of that, we have no saying in its final success. While there are plenty of methods out there that work, nobody can guarantee you that they will also work for your site. On the other hand, SEM is using proven marketing tactics and its results can be predicted, but it will cost you a lot of money. Both SEO and SEM have their place in successful campaign.
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