SEO and SEM are both used almost interchangable, they commonly are bandied by webmasters. Is there really a difference? If there is a difference, what is it?

For starters, SEM is an abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing, and is a broad label that covers pretty much anything that will get your site listed more visibly in search engine results. This can range from utilizing back links to deliberately submitting your URL to search engines. By contrast, SEO is narrower, and stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a subcategory of SEM, but any individual SEM operation does not necessarily contain SEO.

It?s important to know the difference between the two terms; make sure you ask for all information if your unsure before going and spending money on a SEO or SEM package. For example, a company offers you a package, if you don?t ask and get all the information, you might be buying into a package that merely is the company submitting your website URL to a few search engines, something you can easily do yourself.

You need to find out very specifically what a company will do to help you become visible on the web. Figure out what search engines they’re focusing on besides the obvious ones. Yahoo and Google are so popular they’re basically freebies! While some companies will offer URL submission to search engines alongside many other options, it’s not worth paying for that part unless they’ve got a comprehensive list of relevant search engines to submit to. Maybe they’ll offer to keyword optimize your site, in which case you’ll want to know what keywords they’ll use, the density of keyword use, and whether or not they use meta or alt tags.

Finally, it doesn’t really matter what services are offered, as long as the company uses “SEO” or “SEM”. Although, SEM will be more valuable than SEO, because SEM includes SEO as well as other marketing strategies. Even though im sure not all companies are the same in packages. Just simply put, the company could just be charging you for what you could do yourself. If shopping, look for websites with noteable backgroundsand ask about all services offered. Eventually, when you feel your research is sufficient and you know you will get the best value for your money, you can proudly make a efficiently wise decision.

Tags: Internet Marketing, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, search marketing, seo, seo services

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 4:00 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.