Search Engine Optimization vs. Search Engine Marketing/Visibility

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a well known term that is used widely in today’s web community and Clients that wish to have a website built often refer to this when talking with web developers. Clients want more than anything to have their website returned at the top of the list when Google returns its list of search item results, but is this really what clients want? I would have to say it’s not. In this blog we will talk about the difference between SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Visibility (SEV) and what your client really wants.

What Client really Want

Clients want their site at the top of the list and that is really Search Engine Visibility (SEV) but the difference between the two can be confusing to those who are not knowledgeable in this arena. SEO is really a component of search engine marketing, SEO is the process of improving a web site’s placement in the listings of the search engines like Google, Yahoo and many others, these listings are commonly known as “organic” listings. The term SEM is the process of marketing a website via the Internet Search engines: whether by improving rank in organic or natural listings, paid or sponsored listings or a combination of both.

SEO involves:


On-site Optimization:

• Improvement of your HTML code on each page of your site
• Improve the relevance of keywords
• Include Meta, Title and Description tags
• Have good site navigation structure and link wording

Off-site Optimization: Getting back-links from other relevant sites by using keywords or anchor text in the links themselves.

SEM goal is to create additional traffic to websites by increasing their visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). There are several ways to improve SEM.

• Paid inclusion: this is where you pay a search engine company to add your site to their database and your site will appear above other non-paying sites.
• Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising: where advertisements appear alongside of normal search results or on relevant pages on other sites.
• Email Campaigns and Safe lists: these can be free or from a paid provider, create a newsletter and have an opt-in option.
• Write Articles: articles is a great and free way to promote your online services
• Banner and Link Exchanges: Banners need to be catchy and specific on placed on sites that are pertains to your target audience.

Content Management System (CMS) and SEO /SEM/SEV

Search Engine Optimization along with SEM and SEV are largely about good content and proper links and navigation right? So implementing a CMS would be a big help in your efforts? This is not always the case.

CMS must be SEO friendly but most were not designed with SEO in mind, here are a few examples of the problem.

• Dynamic URLs: that use special characters (%&=) throw up red flags to search engine spiders
• Bad Meta Tags: Many CMS do not even allow users to assign unique, relevant Title and Description tags to content
• Keyword Poor URLs: some CMS often do not let you create URSs that include keywords
• Unfriendly Search Design: more than a few CMS can make a page total invisible to a search engines because of text in images, script-based navigation, overuse of AJAX and a host of other practices.

Search Engine Friendly CMS:

When searching for Search Engine Friendly CMS there are a few things to consider and not all CMS that say they are SEO compatible really are. Make sure you understand what you are getting because some CMS mean is that the programmer can modify the systems with add-ons, although this approach works it does require a trained developer who understands it more in-depth. A better solution is a CMS that directly implements common SEO task, that is human/search engine readable URLs, 301 redirects, Meta tags that are built into the CMS itself.