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Search Engine Optimization or Search Engine Marketing

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SEO or SEM ?: Once I was in Restaurant and a guy made a small talk by asking what I do. As a Business Development Officer in a software firm, I think it’s my work to make people aware of what is exactly I do that also somehow helps in promoting my business. I responded that I do the Internet Marketing as in Online Business Promotions like writing Blogs, articles, web designing, SEM & SEO. He was quite comfortable with all these words as he must have heard before but to my surprise he asked affirmatively a very logical question what is good for marketing/promotions for a website SEM or SEO?

I was a bit confused and one thought crossed my mind that I was marketing since last 2 years and when I mentioned SEO or SEM I thought people might have pretty good idea about what I was talking about but I felt I was wrong.

That’s when I started explaining the gentleman:

There is a classified difference between SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Search engine marketing, (SEM), is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.

Search (SEO) "optimizes" website content to achieve a higher ranking in search results, for example, by incorporating specific keywords or links associated with the website. Depending on the context, SEM can be an umbrella term for various means of marketing a website including SEO, or it may contrast with SEO, focusing on just paid components.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results.SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Marketing has really taken over the whole SEO thing. This is due the change in ways in which we use the internet and of course how search engines have advanced. The most prominent advance is in Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter. These not only serve as a way of people communication with each other, but also are a powerful marketing tool; one can communicate, message, promote their requirement.

It is true that SEO is a part of SEM but SEO need to be monitored and updated frequently to reflect changing usage. The main sources of traffic are links from other websites which is possible by SEO.

At the end of February 2011 many started to see that Google has started to penalize companies that are buying links for the purpose of passing off the rank. SEM has however nothing to do with link buying and focuses on organic SEO and PPC management.

So, The conclusion is one must do SEM because that includes SEO; The most important point one must keep in mind is the company that they hire for SEM.

Written by : Subhashish Biswas - The writer works as a Business Development Officer.