SEO and SEM

SEO and SEM: Two Names for the Same Thing?

By most people's standards, the internet is still very young. New technologies and developments in existing technologies are appearing at an extraordinary rate. As technologies change, so does the terminology used to describe them.

I worked for two years as a search engine optimizer. Ask a dozen people to define that term, and you'll get a lot of different answers. A webmaster may be the leader of a large team, including developers, writers, marketers, designers, usability experts, technical support people, and yes, search engine optimizers. Or s/he may perform all or some of those duties alone.

The same is true for search engine optimization. For many people, the term is a new one, and they have no idea what it is an SEO does. To others, SEO is synonymous with SEM -- search engine marketing. In my opinion, there is a big difference between the two.

Search Engine Marketing

I see SEM as a rather broad term. It's everything that can be done to utilize the technology of search engines with the goal of promoting a web site and increasing its traffic, its "stickiness," and, in the case of sites that promote a business (or are a business), increase profits. SEO, therefore, would be a subset of SEM.

Aspects of search engine marketing which I would consider to be outside the realm of search engine optimization include the following:

Paid Inclusion

This is simply the practice of paying a search engine or a directory to add a site to its database immediately, rather than setting up that site so that it will be found by the search engine spiders on its own. In the case of some search engines and directories, paid inclusion is the only way to get listed. For others, it's presented as an option. If you're willing to pay, your site will be listed sooner. It's also a useful practice if you wish to make frequent changes to your content, because your site will be spidered more often and you will be able to test how changes affect your ranking.

Traditional Ads

This involves placing paid advertising on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Normally, these ads appear based on the keywords entered into the search engines, and one is charged based on the number of impressions, i.e. appearances, of the ad. In other words, you pay whether the ad sends anyone to your web site or not.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising

PPC ads are simple enough to look at. They're text-only. PPC ad campaigns are completely controlled by the advertiser. You decide which keywords should bring up your ads, you write the copy, and you decide how much you want to pay. And, as the name indicates, you only pay for an ad when someone clicks it and is brought to your site. There are two main networks of PPC ads, run by Google and Overture, and each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but in both cases, one should be prepared to spend a great deal of time (and money) monitoring and adjusting such a campaign.

The Advantages of These Practices

In contrast to pure SEO, these SEM practices offer the advantage of immediacy. If you need to increase your traffic and your visibility right away, and you don't have a problem with spending a lot of money, this may be the way to go.

The Disadvantages

You knew this was coming, didn't you? Think about it this way: you've spent your time and money to bring people to your web site. What will they see when they get there? You've convinced them, at least for the moment, that your site is worth visiting, so they're expecting to find exactly the information they were seeking. Is it easy to find? Is it there at all? You only have a few seconds to convince them that your site can deliver what they want. Will your visitors, failing to find what they're looking for, click their browser's back button and try another site?

Your site has to be ready for your visitors. It needs to be written, structured, and coded in such a way that the information is clearly laid out and easy to find. If it isn't, your site will either be immediately forgotten by visitors, or worse, it will be remembered as one that fails to deliver.

SEO First

No SEM campaign is complete without SEO. Moreover, since the purpose of SEO is to make the site better for both search engines and users, you may find that it will suffice on its own. In any case, the advantages of SEO over the other aspects of SEM make it clear that, even if you are going to spend additional money on advertising and paid placement, SEO must be your first step in promoting your site.

How to Maximize Benefits From Google Adwords Keywords Tools

Google Adwords is the major platform to operate Pay Per Click advertising campaigns. Pay Per Click also commonly known as Double Click Digital Advertising. Pay Per Click advertising is a very successful method to reach to the potential clients or in other words it is the way of advertising where you can customize your advertising campaigns as per your budget, client demographic requirements or target customers based on geographical location. You have full control on advertising budget to explore the market. Pay Per Click Advertising has a great impact on building the brand globally or locally depends on your product market reach.

There are few steps must be considered while creating the keywords list for the advertising, use the keyword tool various new option to find the most related keywords:

* Find keywords based on your site content. Instead of entering your own keywords, try using the Website Content option. It lets you enter the URL of your business website or of any site related to your business. The AdWords system will then scan your page and then suggest relevant keywords.
* Create new, separate ad groups with similar keywords. We recommend creating several ad groups in each campaign, each with a small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords. Use the Keyword Tool to discover relevant keywords, then divide them into lists of 5 to 20 similar terms.
* Identify negative keywords. The Keyword Tool can show you off-topic keywords that users may be thinking about. Suppose that you sell cut flowers and that you give the keyword 'flowers' to the Keyword Tool. It may suggest the related term 'gardens' and you may want to add that term to your ad group as a negative keyword. That will keep your ad from being displayed on searches for 'flower gardens' or similar terms. This helps to ensure that only interested customers see your ads.
* Find synonyms - or not. The Use synonyms box in the Descriptive words or phrases option is always ticked by default. This means that it might suggest 'bed and breakfast' as a synonym for the keyword 'hotel'. If you untick the box, the tool will suggest only keywords that contain at least one of the terms that you entered.
* Specify a language and location. If you're using the Keyword Tool while signed in to your account, you may see an option to tailor results to a particular location and language. If you happen to be targeting Spanish speakers who live in France, make sure that you set the Keyword Tool to that language and location.
* Start broad and then get specific. Try broad terms like 'flowers' in the Keyword Tool first. Then try specific terms like 'red roses' or 'miniature cactus'.


Google Adwords has made it simple for the advertisers to target the desired audience by providing the various built in tools. An advertising campaign normally comprised of budget, cost of click (CPC) or bid on keyword, keywords, text ads and the landing page and the most important part of the campaign is the history of Google Adwords Account (The Google Adwords Account that is maintaining the campaign, history of keywords and bidding options and CTR.

Google Adwords while designing the campaign keeps track of three things in common, The Keyword you choose, the text ads you write and the content of the landing page or contents of the website as a whole. Google Adwords algorithm calculates the relevancy of these three variables. Let me say it in other words how relevant are the keywords to the text ads and combined these two how relevant to the content of the landing page.

The secret behind doing all this in Google Adwords is to serve the internet user the most suited information what he is looking in the search engine while surfing and querying the search engine. Most of the advertiser bluntly hammers the keywords in the campaign to get the cheap visitors, this attitude of advertising gives them LOW CTR and un interested visitors. Google has launched this advertising mode to reach the potential clients on the fly and not to get the blind visitors. This method of stuffing keywords only increases the cost of the campaign in terms of invalid clicks or no sales.

Well, going back to the topic of maximizing potential through Google Adwords Keyword tool, the factor is relevancy. The keyword, the text ad and the landing page content.

The best practice is to divide the Google Adwords campaign into appropriate Ad Groups and better option is to name them logically to manage. All Ad Groups should be named as per the purpose they are going to serve and then accordingly fill the ad groups with the related keywords and write the compelling related text ad or text ads. Try to add one or 2 keywords in the text add. Let me elaborate more here for example you have 50 keywords in a ad group, try to first group these keywords logically in the ad group and let say you have 3 logical categories of keywords, you need to write minimum three text ads containing at least 2 keywords in the text ads. This way you increase the relevancy factor in your text adds and collection of keywords.

The third and most important part of the Google Adwords campaign is the quality of the landing page, quality means the relevancy of the contents of the page with the text ads, remember here keywords you already made relevant to the text add.

Now look into the scenario how you query the search engines, you first enter the keyword or phrase in the search box of the search engine, when you press the hit button the paid ads display, and you clicked one of the paid ads and landed on the advertiser's website.

Google Adwords also works in the same fashion; this is what the reason writing highly compelling text ads relevant to the keywords comes first and determines the bid price. And at last user visits the website, if website contents are not relevant to the text ads, customer will leave the website without doing any purchase or registering the products etc.