SEO or SEM

Make more money. That's your newly defined goal for your existing website. Revenue, Sales, Profits! To do that you'll have to get more visitors to your site and not only that, more buyers and fewer shoppers! You're not a geek but you've read a little about some of the new Internet technologies designed to help you do that, like Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing. What's the difference between the two and which is better for you and your wallet?

The Differences between SEO and SEM

There are some misguided souls in the wonderful world of the web who think these two technologies are synonymous. Perhaps this is because the two essentially have the same goal: increased traffic, but the similarities end there. In reality, SEM is a subset of SEO in that it relies on specific techniques to achieve the end result of more visitors. Typical SEM techniques involve a variety of forms of paid advertising. Sponsored or Traditional Ads is one of them. You're seen the results on the right hand side of a Google Search Results page. These are paid ads and they appear if the search query entered by the Internet user matches a keyword in the ad. But these ads are expensive and the sponsor pays a fee every time the ad pops up -- whether the user clicks through the ad to get to the website or not. Another popular SEM technique is PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. Here the sponsor writes a text ad and selects the keywords which will bring up the ad and the amount they will pay. Google Adwords is a form of PPC advertising and the sponsoring company only pays here when the user actually clicks through the ad.

SEM -- although it can be expensive -- does have the advantage of "right now" in that it has the potential to draw visitors to your site quickly. SEO is a more involved process that seeks to make your site more "organically" attractive by improving things like the links within the site and to the site from other places. An organic result -- the sites listed on the left side of a SERP (Search Engine Results Page) -- is one that comes up strictly based on the content and popularity of the site with no paid prompting involved. But this process takes time. Another way to look at what SEO can do is to dig into that highly technical term -- "stickiness."

Stickiness: What Do They Do When They Get There?

The most expensive, well designed, and well written SEM campaign may get visitors to your site, but they do nothing to ensure the visitor will "stick" or stay on the site and not take a glance and immediately hit the back button on the browser. If your site is poorly designed making it hard for the visitor to navigate and it contains poorly written content visitors will head for the button. SEO looks at all aspects of what makes a site attractive to a Search Engine. If you're truly interested in getting the biggest bang for your buck consider getting into an SEO campaign with some SEM techniques as part of that campaign. Good luck meeting your goal!