What is the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

What is the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

SEO and SEM both are different as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim for increasing the visibility in search engines. SEO generally focuses on organic search results in getting at the top of the list when a user searches for keywords related to your business, while SEM goes beyond SEO as it involves the methods which can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising. SEM also includes choosing the right keywords to invest in advertising when you want to appear in the paid search results on the major search engines. Combining both of them into a strategy could be very beneficial for your business.  SEO In Search Engine Optimization, there is a prescribed set of best practices that help the search engine crawlers to understand exactly what your business offers. It also allows search engines to show your content and information to people who are seeking your products or services. Nowadays most of product or services based company uses SEO service to promote their services.

SEO mainly comprises of two different activities:  On-Page SEO includes: 1. Incorporating the keyword into title tags, Meta descriptions, heading tags, alt text.

2. Blog posts and unique page content that is written and optimized with quality 3. formatting the page URLS 4. Optimized loading speed of website 5. Google authorship incorporated 6. Social sharing integration within your content  Off-Page SEO includes: 1. Creating a high quality and natural backlink profile 2. Social sharing like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn 3. Social bookmarking (Stumbleupon, Reddit, Plurk)  SEM According to Wikipedia, “Search engine marketing is a form of Internet marketing that involved the promotion and advertisement of websites by increasing their online visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS) through optimization”.

The main difference between SEO and SEM is that search engine optimization is simply a component of search engine marketing and SEM includes components of paid search, such as PPC and SMM (social media marketing). It is also essential to note that you should never use both terms SEO and SEM interchangeably, although they work similarly and dependently, but they are not the same term.

iMediaDesigns is a Toronto based SEO Company which is an IT consulting firm offering strategy and app development services to support ecommerce infrastructure.