wafadeshmukh

Wafa Deshmukh
Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization - whats the difference?


Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) refers to the short text advertisements which generally appear at the top or down the right hand side of search engine results. These are often labelled as "sponsored Links" or "sponsored results". These are paid ads also known as Inorganic ads.


Search Engine Marketing process is often generically referred to as "pay per click" (PPC) advertising because you only pay when someone clicks on the advertising link, not when your advertisement is displayed.

Search engine marketing (or, more correctly, search engine advertising) is effectively paid advertising in search engines, where you 'Pay Per Click' (PPC). It is text advertising delivered in response to 'trigger' words typed into the search box. The surfer types in a search phrase, the PPC advertisements which have bid on that phrase are displayed, and if the surfer clicks on a text advertisement they are taken to the advertiser's website. At that point, the advertiser's account is charged for the 'click through' by the search engine's advertising partner.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is defined as the process of building pages in a manner which enables the pages to rank highly in 'algorithmically' determined search results, which are generally displayed on the left hand side of the page. The 'algorithmic' results are independently determined by the search engine's own mathematical algorithm, and are based on relevance to the search phrase. Search engines use complex mathematical algorithms to determine the relevance of indexed pages for a particular search phrase. The algorithms are generally understood to factor over 100 'on the page' (i.e. the words used on the page itself, their location, repetition etc.) and 'off the page' (i.e. links pointing to the page, site popularity etc.) aspects in the calculation of their results.

Search engines index HTML code. Before a website can rank in a search engine, it has to be designed with accessibility in mind. Search engines are effectively text browsers with no plugins (no Javascript, no Macromedia Flash). If a site isn't accessible - i.e. the site/ page can't be 'seen' or 'read' by a search engine, then the site/ page can't be indexed by the search engine. Links that can't be seen - can't be followed by the search engine.

Many 'cool' web design tools produce content which can not be seen or read - and therefore can not be indexed by search engines. Search engines can't index 'pictures of words'.

Therefore, it is always advisable to have SEO done with the relevant keywords to your site & always avoid FLASH as the crawler can't read FLASH websites, also it makes your site very slow!
 
Agencies and organizations these days have to heavily rely on both.

SEM results are more immediate in nature. So companies, optimize their keywords and ensure they get a lot of targeted traffic from their SEM activities.

SEO is more long term in nature and its real benefits start reaping after about 6 months of continuous work and optimization.

The trick is to do SEM for immediate returns on keywords and do SEO for the same keywords in such a way that they do not require SEM after 6 months duration.

Rinse and repeat.
 
Agencies and organizations these days have to heavily rely on both.

SEM results are more immediate in nature. So companies, optimize their keywords and ensure they get a lot of targeted traffic from their SEM activities.

SEO is more long term in nature and its real benefits start reaping after about 6 months of continuous work and optimization.

The trick is to do SEM for immediate returns on keywords and do SEO for the same keywords in such a way that they do not require SEM after 6 months duration.

Rinse and repeat.

I agree with you, It is advisable to go with Search Engine Marketing for immediate results and at the same time optimize website with relevant keywords which will help in better ranks over a period of time.

The strategy should always be to make maximum use of keywords on Social Media, Website, Blog for better visibilty.

Thank you Dhruv, I do agree with the SEM and its usage for advertising. SEM will definitely help yield better results during a campaign and thus should be used.
 
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