SEM versus SEO
So what do you want to do? Search Engine Marketing or Search Engine Optimization? Firstly, the difference between the two should be established. The differences are not great, SEO is part of or can be part of SEM.
Search engine optimization is purely targeted at search engines, it is a method to gain organic long term growth and visitors. On page SEO targets areas such as page layout (coding), meta tags, keywords, title tag, amount of code on page v’s the amount of text on the page, great original content and enough of it on each page, internal link structure, good relevant headings (using H tags and again keywords in the headings), and alt tags.
This is all on page Search engine optimization it all helps and is helpful to getting good rankings in the search engine results page (SERP). These are tasks that are withn your control and control them you should, there is no point in missing the obvious.
Off page SEO is harder to control. Getting links and relevant links is the way forward. Any links from most any pages will do to start with, as times goes on and your pages are indexed by Google it is time to narrow that to what will help in the long term. That is relevant links. Relevant links have two essential components. Link text or anchor text, I want link text that lead to my site to say “Dublin Web Design” or “Web Design Dublin” some of these words can be changed to Designer or Ireland instead of Dublin, but you get the general idea. Why? This is the most important area of all search engine optimization, because this currently is the most important item on the Google algorithm – it is that simple. You might think it is not fair, you have great content, but without those links very few people are going to see that you have this great content.
If number one on the Google algorithm is link text, then the number two is relevance. This term is a bit more fuzzy than link text. Relevant can be all over the board. However a good way of seeing it is if the page you want the link from returns for the search items you want listed for. Let me explain this a bit more. I want to be listed for “web design dublin” therefore getting a link from any page on the internet that is indexed for web design will do nicely. A quick search reveals that there are 1,110,000,000 pages in the Google index for that search term. This is were my main relevant links are hiding. But remember that is only one key search term I want listing for. You, as I do, will want to list for many different keywords. Sometimes targeting keywords that are not so highly fought over can produce just as good results quicker and for longer, this is known as the long tail.
This outlines search engine optimization. Search engine marketing CAN include SEO, however it does not have to. Search engine marketing is as it says – marketing. Good SEM should include as least some element of SEO, for example – all on page SEO. SEM includes, Pay Per Click (PPC) using the likes of Google adwords, Yahoo! and MSN also have similar services. It is a way to easily control a marketing budget and ones that is very flexible and can be changed at a minutes notice. Link buying falls into the SEM arena from companies like Text Link ads. Buying banner adverts on other sites at cost per thousand displays, paying blogs to review your site at review me, SEM is often paid for and, though it does not have to be, it is often short term and usually used in conjunction with SEO campaigns to get the short term results that a company or client requires.