Monday, February 02, 2009
What’s the Difference Between SEO & SEM: Part 1 of 2
Posted by
Misty Beier
at
09:30 AM
First off, let’s define SEO and SEM:
- SEO:
- Search Engine Optimization
- SEM:
- Search Engine Marketing
I’ll try to keep this short, but it won’t be easy since this is a great interest of mine.
So what’s the difference between SEO and SEM? Let’s start with SEO.
SEO is used mostly by web designers and front-end web developers to optimize a website for search engines. In other words, SEO helps people find your website. This is done by:
- quality content,
- web standards,
- links,
- inbound marketing,
- and keyword placement on your website.
Let’s take a closer look at each of these parts of SEO.
Quality Content
In my honest opinion, I would say this is one of the most important tasks you could do to bring people to your site; write quality content.
Content can be anything from audio, video, photos, graphics, and documents, but most importantly words. Writing about what your company does, events coming up, articles on a new product, and even announcements and news will help drive traffic to your site. Starting a company blog is a great way to communicate with your audience and create interaction between readers. Just keep one thing in mind: write content for people to read, not for search engines. If you have good, quality content on your site, people will read it.
Web Standards
One of my favorite subjects. Web standards are heavily involved with web design and development. This is another part of SEO that I find very important. Not only are you optimizing your website findability with web standards, but you’re also writing semantic XHTML.
Wait! What’s semantic XHTML? That’s easy to answer. It’s where you write code according to the content. For example, below this code snippet uses div tags when it could be easily coded using p tags.
<div class="paragraph">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</div>
<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
Not only does this make your XHTML simpler and cut your coding time in half, but you’re now able to target the p tag to style in your CSS.
Writing semantic code is a part of web standards. Use h1 tags for headings or logos, use p tags for paragraphs, use ul tags for unordered lists; this is all semantic code. The other part of web standards is how you use the DOCTYPE and attributes of XHTML tags.
Let’s say your DOCTYPE is <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">. This means that you need to close all tags, write in lowercase, nest elements correctly, use quotes for attribute values, and many more. Also such attributes are required for XHTML 1.0. This includes using the alt attributes for img tags for screen readers.
Links
This also gets us to links. Including the title attribute for a tags not only is read by screen readers, but it creates a tool tip to enhance the user’s experience. The title attribute can let the user know what page they’ll be going to if they click on that link.
Inbound links and outbound links almost have the same level of importance when it comes to SEO. We all know that inbound links to your website is great. It creates traffic and improves your page rank. But outbound links are just as great, or at least they should be.
Let’s take for example your real estate website. On the Seller’s Resources page you have a list of links for real estate attorneys. Some of these links go to creditable websites, and others don’t.
What makes a site creditable? (I’ll make a note to write about that in a future post.) Let’s just say for right now the discreditable websites contain a lot of ads, blinking text, lots of graphics, and hardly any text or contact info. If one of your customers clicks one of these links and it goes to an discreditable website, your customer might think your site is discreditable and possibly will lose trust in your services or products. At the very worst, you could lose that customer.
Make sure you link to websites that contain quality content for your customers to find helpful.
Inbound Marketing
I could go on all day about inbound marketing, but I’ll try to keep it short.
Inbound marketing is the cheap and easy way to draw traffic to your website. It’s cheap because all the services I’m about to tell you about are for free to use. It’s easy because anyone can do it.
But you need time to use inbound marketing.
Here’s the short-cut to inbound marketing: go and sign up for an account at the websites below and start contributing videos, podcasts, articles, images, whatever you would like to do, and within a short amount of time you’ll drive traffic to your site.
Two other things you can do with inbound marketing is to write comments on blogs in your industry, and meaningful comments. Don't spam blogs. The other thing is to create your own company blog. (I’ll make a note on this to write about in a future post, also.)
Keyword Placement
Another important aspect of SEO. This also ties with web design and web standards on how the content is presented and keywords used in XHTML element and meta tags. (I’ll have to write about this in another post later on, too.)
In short, choose a couple of keywords or keyword phrases to use within the copy of your website. Place 2-3 keywords in your page title and repeat them throughout the pages. But keep in mind to have a keyword density of 3-7%. Anything above 7% is considered keyword stuffing. I recommend using WordTracker and Google to find keywords for your website.
This has just been a quick run-down of what SEO is and what all you can do with it to help search engines find your website. There’s a lot more about SEO, including some technical back-end practices to follow. You can find all sorts of help and good information by visiting the following:
If you've enjoyed part 1 of this post, don't forget part 2 is coming up soon.