Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing

What is search engine marketing (SEM)? What is search engine optimisation (SEO)? How do I promote my website? Do I have to outsource to a consultant?

There is a lot of helpful information, as well as a lot of misinformation, floating around regarding search engine optimisation (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). First of all, let's start with the names: SEO stands for search engine optimisation. In its simplest form SEO is the process of tailoring a website (text, titles, meta tags, alt tags, etc) so that the search engines will assign a good rank to the site for specific search terms.

Poor SEO is primarily a problem that block search engine spiders from doing their job. Spiders are on a mission to:

• Find quality content.
  
  
• Identify that content and separate it from extraneous information.
  
  
• Grade the content for clarity.
  
  
• Extract the essence of a site's content on a page-by-page basis.
  
  
• Grade the content for source reputation.
  
  
• Understand the content's context in respect to the Internet as a whole (assign communities or explore relationships between content and sites).
  
  
• Catalog the content's URL.
  
  
• Keep the content cache fresh.

Generally, 90% of SEO relates to removing obstacles to the search engines finding and understanding the content's essence.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is 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.