SEO VS SEM

SEO and SEM: Two Names for the Same Thing?

By most people's standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.

I worked for three years as a webmaster. Ask a dozen people to define that term, and you'll get a lot of different answers. A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.

The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM -- search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.

Search Engine Marketing

I see SEM as a rather broad term. It's everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a web site and increasing its traffic, its "stickiness," and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.

Aspects of search engine marketing which I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:

Paid Inclusion

This is simply the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some search engines and directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it's presented as an option. If you're willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It's also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content, because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.

Traditional Ads

This involves placing paid advertising on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Normally, these ads appear based on the keywords entered into the search engines, and one is charged based on the number of impressions, i.e. appearances, of the ad. In other words, you pay whether the ad sends anyone to your web site or not.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They're text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.

The Advantages of These Practices

In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don't have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go.

The Disadvantages

You knew this was coming, didn't you? Think about it this way: you've spent your time and money to bring people to your web site. What will they see when they get there? You've convinced them, at least for the moment, that your site is worth visiting, so they're expecting to find exactly the information they were seeking. Is it easy to find? Is it there at all? You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they're looking for, click their browser's back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn't, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors, or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

SEO First

No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. Moreover, since the purpose of SEO is to make the site better for both search engines and users, you may find that it will suffice on its own. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

(source-http://www.raisemyrank.com/articles/seo-sem.htm)

ADVANTAGES OF SEO

The advantages of SEO are numerous and far reaching for any site that obtains the rankings it seeks on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Let's take a closer look.

Let's talk about fast food outlets. This may seem an odd place to start with when talking about the advantages of SEO, but it isn't. The various fast food companies pursue the placement of their restaurants with great care and research. Once they identify the optimal position, they open their store and reap the benefits of the traffic for years.

McDonalds is the classic fast food company. They spend $50,000 to $100,000 researching where to open one of their outlets each time they do it. What are they researching? They are trying to find the optimal spot in a community to maximize their exposure to potential customers as well as make it incredibly convenient for said customers to buy food from them. Think about it. Have you ever seen a McDonalds that is hidden back in the corner of a strip mall or is hard to get to from the street?

As strange as it sounds, your site should be positioned like a McDonalds on the web. You want to research the keyword phrases being used by the maximum number of people in your business area. You then want to position your site in front of them by getting ranked in the top 10 for the search results for that keyword phrase. Once this is accomplished, you can reap the benefits of continual business just like a well-positioned McDonalds franchise. Of course, one of the advantages of SEO compared to McDonalds is you can stay open all night!

Let's boil the above example down to more fundamental advantages. The primary advantage of SEO over any other type of internet marketing is found in the long-term aspects. Once your site is ranked in the top 10 for your keyword phrase, you should be able to keep it there with a minimum of fuss. This means that you will receive free traffic from prospects 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year for as long as you keep your site up.

Return on investment is another one of the advantages of SEO over paid advertising. SEO can take time to produce rankings, so the initial return on your investment in it is poor. Once rankings are obtained, however, the return on investment becomes excellent as you receive a large volume of free traffic. In contrast, paid web advertising produces more upfront, but caps your profitability in the long term. Why? Well, you are always going to be paying for the traffic. In two years, you will be paying the same or more for the identical traffic you are getting today. With SEO, you will not.

To understand the practical advantages of SEO, do a search for the most basic keyword in your business line. If you have a site offering carpet cleaning services, do a search for "carpet cleaning". Now, imagine how much money those sites that appear are making.
(source-www.alucardseoservices.com)

Future of Seo

Its a tough question since the search engine landscape changes very quickly.

As long as Google is still around and still focused on relevancy we will never have to worry about engines showing all ads all the time. Even if Google goes public and becomes the next in a long line of greedy search engines to totally screw up their results, another will come along to take its place. So, no, we will never have to worry about there being only paid listings.

Aside from that aspect, I do see a rather bleak future for traditional SEO in many senses. A few years ago, only a fraction of Web sites had even a rudimentary bit of optimization done to them. This made it easy for anyone with the slightest bit of SEO knowledge to come in and obtain some decent results. We also had many more options open to us because there was no one search engine that dominated the searches. If you didn't get high rankings in one engine, it wasn't always the end of the world; you could still get tons of traffic from the other engines.

Today, clients seem to be mostly interested in Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN. This limits the databases we have to work with. This makes the job of an SEO much harder, and more frustrating. It's just not as easy as it used to be to get high rankings. (I know I'm partly to blame since I've been teaching the average Joe Shmoe how to optimize for years, but deep down I know it's better for the Internet as a whole to have more sites optimized.) On top of that, clients are becoming more demanding because they're tired of spending huge amounts on PPC ad campaigns.

One thing that I know for sure is that client expectations will probably have to be somewhat lowered in the near future, if not already. Optimizing for longer phrases will become the norm, and if you want the most competitive phrases, there's a good chance you're going to have to buy them through ads.

The good news is that due to the difficulty in gaining high rankings these days, many SEOs are also focusing on other aspects of their clients' Web sites. The reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, even if you get high rankings for highly competitive keywords that bring tons of targeted traffic, if your Web site sucks, you still won't make any money off of it. Secondly, when you are required to focus on less general phrases, it forces you to really take a hard look at your site, and make sure it's truly working for you.

SEOs will need to take usability and conversions into consideration when coming up with your search engine marketing campaigns in the future, if they're not already doing this. Therefore, I see there being a much brighter future for those SEOs who are able to make the transition. Whether that means learning all that stuff themselves or partnering with those who do, it's gonna have to get done somehow. Since SEOs are generally the ones "fixing" broken sites, it makes sense for this to become part of their regular job description.
(source-www.searchengineguide.com)