Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the set of processes focused on achieving high organic rankings on the major search engines such as Google. SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is actually a broader term that includes SEO and many other Internet Marketing processes including PPC advertising, Social Media Optimization (SMO) and Social Bookmarking. Businesses of all sizes are becoming increasingly aware of these terms and the relative importance of these processes as essential to online success.
As we have shared many times with our readers on our Optimum7 site, 68% of online searchers DON’T go past the first page; 98% DON’T go past the 3rd page of search results. These stats are central to the increased awareness of SEO and SEM that if you are not on the top 3 pages of Google, Bing and Yahoo for targeted keywords, you are essentially NOT on the internet, at least from a marketing perspective.
Awareness is half the battle. Accomplishing online success is of course the winning piece. As in the real world, online marketing success is an ongoing, never-ending fiercely competitive battle for visibility, name recognition, reputation development, sales and profits. Businesses are also becoming increasingly aware of this in that SEO is not something that is completed and then you can just move on. SEO is not a finite process; it is high level marketing; not a set of tricks as some out there may want you to believe.
Key components of SEO include:
- On-page optimization – the geeky stuff i.e. metatags, title tags, sitemaps, W3 Validation, CSS coding and dozens of other to-do’s.
- Off-page optimization - mainly, this refers to the constant, steady stream of new, non-duplicate content that serves to establish your company and website as an ever-increasing relevant and authoritative source of information. This process of copywriting and online syndication combined with expert optimization generates highly relevant, naturally occurring Backlinks. Backlinks are the mother’s milk of SEO. Backlinks are one-way links coming from websites directly into highly relevant content on your website. Google sees a Backlink as a vote in favor of your site, particularly when the site linking to yours, is highly thought of in the eyes of Google as well. It is not an oversimplification to say that the websites that do the best job in generating the best Backlinks is often the websites you find on top of Google.
SEM Components
Aside from SEO, SEM includes:
- PPC Advertising – the placement of advertising targeted to keywords and keyword groupings. The location and frequency of display is controlled by bidding, daily budget, keyword targeted, and performance of the ad (Quality Score). These ads appear share space with the organic listings generated through SEO.
- Social Media Optimization – this area blurs somewhat with SEO because content syndication generated through the SEO process, often finds its home on one or more of the countless social media sites. The best known of these are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. Google is using the activity on these sites to factor more heavily in its Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS). However, the power of search is also quite evident within the social media sites themselves.
- Social Bookmarking – also factoring heavily in SEO and Google rankings, these sites allow its users to share their bookmarks online; to both have access to their bookmarks from any internet interface but also used by the social bookmarking sites to rank sites / pages by frequency of bookmarking. Clearly this is of strong interest to Google in generating its results. The top social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Digg, and StumbleUpon.
As is increasingly clear, businesses and individuals are increasingly aware of SEO and SEM mainly due to the fact that we are all increasingly connected to each other online.
Do you need to take advantage of these clear trends? Do you want to be easily found on Google, other search engines and the Social Mediasphere? Contact us for a no obligation initial consultation.
March 1, 2010
