Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) work hand in hand to drive as much traffic as possible into your website. What good is a fantastic website if it can't be found? Let's see what the differences are between SEM and SEO and why both are important to your website.

Search Engine Marketing

The most common form of SEM is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising. Through Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, you can create ad campaigns with keywords relevant to your website or a product you are selling. When someone enters the keywords on the search engine, your ad will display in the "Sponsored Links" section of the page. When someone clicks on the link you will be charged a small fee. We can help you set up PPC budgets and keyword campaigns to make sure your advertising dollars are being well spent. You can accurately track how many users enter your site from a PPC ad, how much that is costing you, and what percentage of clicks results in "conversions", or sales. With SEM you can practically guarantee first page search engine results almost instantly.

Search Engine Optimization

Now wouldn't it be great if you can have all the traffic that SEM can bring in, but without paying for it? Enter, SEO! SEO, or Search Engine Optimization takes place behind the scenes of your website. It's how your website is built, how the site organizes information, and what keywords are present in the content of your site. The advantage to SEM is that it can go to work fast. SEO on the other hand takes time to develop, but can pay off bigger dividends in the long run.

Although SEO techniques can be applied to any site, it is best if the site is built with SEO in mind from the start. Search engines don't rely on eyes and brains to figure out what's important and valuable on a website, they rely on algorithms. We build all of our sites so that the search engines will find them easy to index and be able to see clearly what's important on the page. We identify the relevant keywords for your business and make sure they are prevalent in the content.

There are three basic things the search engines look for when placing a value on your page. Popular, Frequent, and Unique content.

• Popular: Search engines keep track of how many links point to your site, and the more incoming links you have out on the web, the more important the search engine believes your site to be and will deliver a higher page rank as a result. We can help you learn how to get more incoming links to your site.
• Frequent: The more often new content is added, the more relevant the search engine believes your site to be. This is one reason Blogs are so popular. By simply writing a new article every week or month, you can greatly increase the value a search engine places on your page.
• Unique: Unfortunately copying and pasting other peoples articles won't get you much more than a visit to the courtroom. Search engines are smart enough to know when sites are simply reusing content that's out there, and when a site has unique content that no one else has, it's a big boost to your page rank.

A well thought out web strategy will feature both SEM and SEO. One is not better than the other, they work together. We have tons of real world experience, driving traffic to websites, and seeing the results firsthand.