Confused between search engine optimization and search engine marketing? Is there any difference between both these terms/techniques? I was also very confused about these terms. After some study on Internet, I come to know about the difference between SEO and SEM. Below you will get my views (after analyzing various forums and articles) about search engine optimization and search engine marketing. I wrote this article to clarify the difference between Search engine optimization and Search engine Marketing. I hope this article will clear all your questions regarding difference between SEO and SEM.

Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Optimization is a form of Internet Marketing which includes paid listing PPC (pay per click) and natural search engine optimization (SEO), Text Ads, Banner Ads and Press Release etc.
SEM is the process of using search engines as an advertising tool.

More about SEM
SEM or Search engine marketing includes all the works required for increasing the visibility of a website and getting leads either by ethical search engine optimization or paid inclusion in PPC or banner advertisement.

Google Adword, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter are top search engine marketing vendors. They provide text advertisements, which appear at the right side or on the top of result pages. There are some other ad networks which provide banner advertising or ad placement advertising on relevant sites such as Komli's advertising network, kontera ads, ad revenue etc.

There are various type of payment modes in online advertising such as PPC, CPM, CPL, CPA. PPC stands for Pay Per Click means advertiser has to pay every time someone click on his ad. CPM stands for Cost Per thousand Impressions, in this mode advertiser pays according to the views/impressions of his ad. And another is CPL, means Cost Per Lead, in this system advertisers pay for getting leads. CPA stands for Cost per Acquisition or Cost Per Sale means an average dollar amount to the overall in clicks it takes to convert to a sale. Some agencies also allow the ad placement at a flat monthly fee.

Paid advertising is very effective form of marketing means you have complete control over the budget, keywords and the websites you wish to target. Apart from that SEO (search engine optimization) is also a part of SEM which takes time but work for a long time.

Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the Process of promoting a website ranking onto various search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN etc. Search Engine Optimization is mainly concerned with improving natural search results.

More about SEO
Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving a websites natural & organic ranking in search engine result pages. For getting decent ranking in search engines, your website should be search engine friendly. This more reasonable process is often slow and new website can take upto one year for showing decent rankings in Search engines. Search engine optimization is based on two main components, given below:

On-Page Optimization:
Title Tag optimization
Meta Tags (some engines)
Keywords in the content
Quality of content
Keywords in hyperlinks
Keywords in heading and bold tags
Keywords in URL
Keyword density
Link structure
Sitemap
Indexability of the web page

Off-Page optimization:
Number of incoming links
Keywords in the anchor text
Relevancy of sites that link to yours
Quality of sites that link to yours

Conclusion:

SEO - Search Engine Optimization - focuses upon the natural search aspect of your website and how you rank in the search engines. SEO is an effective tool of SEM.

SEM/SM - Search Engine Marketing or Search Marketing involves many components, including SEO, PPC, Banner Ads, Text Link Building, Optimized Press Releases, Shopping Feeds for Comparison sites, Contextual Ads and Blogs etc.

Search engine marketing is the entire scope of things that have to do with marketing your site for search engine traffic, and search engine optimization is simply one subset of it.

SEO Tips – Get the tips and tricks to boost up your ranking on various search engines by browsing the pages of Important SEO Tips.

Please send your comments/suggesions.

Name of the web pages are taken into consideration by search engine while calculating the keyword density and listing your webpage in the SERP. So you have to pay special attention to page naming because it is meaningless to make pages with names such as page1.html, page2.html etc.

One can incorporate the targeted keyphrase in the name of the title because it will help in improving the search engine ranking as well as it also helps the person who is doing editing in the site. Apart from that it can attract visitors when your webpage is listed in the search engine result pages.

The name of the webpage should be same as your keyphrase. You can use hyphen (-) instead of space and underscore (_) to separate the words. For example if your page is about search engine optimization the name of the page would be search-engine-optimization.html. All search engine treats hyphen (-) as keyword separator while some search engine do not consider underscore (_) as keyword separator. So it is wise to use hyphen in the name of the webpage. One More thing you need to take into consideration while naming any page is not to use space in the name of the webpage for example example.com/search engine optimization.html because when the page is loaded in the browser the space will converts into %20 sign. So Ideally, best way is to use hyphen to separate to keywords in the name of the webpage.

The Extension of webpage depends on the scripting language used. Normally htm or html is used in simple web pages. But if one has used any scripting language the extension may be changed as php, asp or aspx. If you have not used any scripting language its up to you either use htm or html. Most commonly used extension for web pages are php, asp, aspx, jsp, htm, html etc.

SEO Tips – Get the tips and tricks to boost up your ranking on various search engines by browsing the pages of Important SEO Tips.

Please send your comments/suggesions.