When your site seems to be your whole life, SEO and SEM are no longer unfamiliar to your ears. However, do you really notice that they are different roads to take although they share the same idea, to drive more traffic to your site? Have you figured out which one to use for improving your site traffic? Or, deciding the best is still a big question mark for you? If so, let me help you erase all the confusion.
What is the Idea of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
Everybody must have a picture of what SEO is in their mind. Nevertheless, nothing wrong to review it again. Frankly speaking, SEO refers to the strategies of increasing traffic site with appropriate keywords or tags, site design, and structure, coding, or whatever directed to natural site optimization to target different search types such as usual search, image search, or others.
SEO is done through the calculation of mathematics, computer languages, and linguistics to define what people search for and to attract more clicks to a website. It basically aims to improve the site’s rank in search engines, especially those leading search engines such as Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft. Why do you think rank is important? Very simple. The higher your site ranks the better your chance of attracting more visitors. And the higher traffic your site has, the higher your chance to grow your business and gain success.
And what about Search Engine Marketing (SEM)?
People say that SEM is almost or exactly the same as SEO since they share the same purpose, to drive more traffic. However, when you dig deeper, you will know they work on different paths. When SEO has the stuff to do with coding, computing languages, calculation, designs, and structures (simply free of charge if you can do it by yourselves), SEM already includes SEO and paid listing or inclusion. You get what you pay for. Webmasters define SEM as internet marketing strategies.
This term, SEM, didn’t appear suddenly. SEO developed as SEM when it began to expand the strategies into marketing and advertising chances, pioneered by leading search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, by paying some amount of money to get included or listed. These are obviously beneficial for your site traffic. You pay and they’ll do the job for you. When you decide to use SEM, that will cover all possibilities to increase your site traffic and rank, involving payment for inclusion in search engines and listing in directories, online marketing strategies, and the SEO itself.
To Decide which One
This now depends on how far the online success you want to achieve. It is now very crystal clear that both are very essential for your website revenues. There is none that is exactly the best. The combination of them will be a great chance for you to develop online. What you need to do is calculate how much budget you want to spend since SEM is more costly than SEO only. However, money does talk. You can say that what you pay is what you get.
