After conducting extensive research I have come to the conclusion that there is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding the subject of Search Engine Marketing. The greatest misunderstanding is in confusing the terms Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

One would think that those individuals claiming to be SEO experts should be knowledgeable about the subject and recognize the clear distinction. Apparently this is not the case; the internet is full of misguided information, from so said experts. Proving, I suppose that the industry is liberally spattered with cowboys.

To beginning, let us first define the term “Search Engine Optimisation” (henceforth referred to as SEO).

SEO

SEO is the process of manipulating the structure and content of a internet page in such a roadway that it will perform better in the search engine’s organic listings. The techniques involved might be sub-structured into several areas of activity, as detailed below.

1) Page readiness – Search engines expect to crawl clean HTML code. Every address of a internet page should be validated to eliminate errors and sloppy coding.

2) Site readiness – Search engine web bots follow the links on your web pages and thereby find new pages to index. If a web bot meets a broken link it cannot continue spidering your web page. Make sure you have no broken links. Also, provide a page map. A tool for building address maps is available at my internet address , proSEO Zone.

3) Keyword selection – It is vitally important to select the right keywords for which a particular page is to be optimized. The most apparent keywords are not always the best choice, and are almost always mega-competitive. Choose intelligently .

4) Site structure – Your website should be structured in such a roadway that each page could be optimized for a maximum of two keywords. Do not try to optimize for a lot of keywords on one address . Remember, you have to write for your users. Writing copy is a balancing act that keeps both users and search engines happy, and is better achieved on a well structured address .

5) Copy writing – the visible writing on your web pages should be structured to add the two most important keywords for that page’s content. Get the keywords into headers. Work the keywords into paragraph writing , having your keywords appear near the start, near the middle, and near the end. Make some keywords bold, some italic and some underlined.

6) HTML tags – The most important of these is the Title tag. Get both keywords for that page into the Title tag, without repetition. For example, if your main key phrase is “diet plans”, and your second phrase is “diet supplements”, the Title tag should read “diet plans and supplements”. Do not repeat the word diet, to search engines it can look like spamming. If your main concern is to improve your Google ranking, you might have overlooked the Meta keywords and Meta description tags, don’t, there are more search engines than Google and they may all bring traffic. Also, get the keywords into H1 tags, H2 tags, alt attributes, and very important, your backlink text.

And after doing all that for every page in your website you could be asking: so where does SEM come in?

SEM

SEM includes SEO plus all the other things you might do to boost your visibility in the search engines and increase explicit visitors to your internet address . A condensed list could be as follows:

1) SEO (see above). 2) A hyperlink building strategy 3) Pay per click (PPC) campaigns. 4) Banner exchanges. 5) Press releases. 6) And any other activity that will get your website noticed.

SEM then, is the full package. Whereas SEO techniques are a vital, but not the only, component of that package.

Richard Brennan is a search engine optimisation and marketing consultant, and founder of proSEO Zone. proSEO Zone specialise in improve Google ranking techniques.