By: Alan Smith
Submitted: 2009-02-08 23:29:52 | Word Count: 424
Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are two different terms aimed at single goal of marketing your website and related products online. Generally SEO is the part of SEM and its one of its technique to bring forth your site in search engine ranking. SEM is marketing technique that involves tactics like paid inclusion, paid ads, etc for advertising a website.
In search engines the page showing search results is known as SERP (search engine result page). Results on this page is very diverse, here you can find paid ads listed on the sides of the search pages and also paid inclusion shown on the top of the page. You may select any of these services for special showcasing on the search engine results page by paying certain nominal amount of fees.
SEO which is a part of SEM makes your website friendly by optimizing it in an organic manner. This technique does not require any purchasing of ads or paying for your site to rank higher. It functions by making your site attractive with apt keywords/phrases so that it ranks high in the result page. Usage of inbound links, META tags coding and keywords makes a website desirable for web crawlers.
Sometimes the problem arises while selecting which tool to use SEO or SEM? As discussed earlier SEM is a paid form of marketing where you have to shell out certain amount of money for getting a special position in result pages. But overall if seen, it is less beneficial than SEO. Instant short term results can be procured by SERP, but sometimes visitors seldom clicks on these paid results leading to loss to both your money and resource.
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Some basic ways to optimize a website are- giving title to images utilizing the keywords, alt tags being named using keywords, keywords in domain name and page title.
Widely used SEM techniques are video marketing, pay per click advertising, social network marketing, search engine optimization and article marketing.
Any method you use for website optimization stresses more on creating relevant online content rich in keywords. The content consists of apt back links that points back to your website. Major search engines make use of these factors for ranking your website higher. More the number of back links from the original content better the results.
