SEO Tips – What’s the Difference Between SEO and SEM?
Do you know what I love about marketers? I love how they absolutely can butcher some terms to death. SEO and SEM are two examples. Many beginners use these interchangeably as if they meant the same thing. However, they are not the same. So, in order to clear up some of the confusion, this article is going to first explain the difference between the two and then offer some tips on each. I am sure you will find this informative and hopefully, keep you from talking about one thing when you really mean the other.
Let’s start with SEO, which stands for search engine optimization. This actually refers to the practice of using on and off page tactics to get your site ranked higher on the SERPs. On page tactics would be the use of keywords, anchor text, meta tags and so on, in order to get your site ranked. Off page tactics would be writing articles, getting backlinks, using video and other web 2.0 properties to get your site ranked higher on the SERPs. In a nutshell, that’s SEO.
Okay, so then what exactly is SEM? SEM is using paid marketing in order to get more traffic to your site. This could mean using things like Google Adwords or even Yahoo’s or MSN’s pay per click services. Essentially, you are using paid search engine listings in order to get traffic. It has nothing to do with your actual organic placement in the SERPs. In fact, your site can be on page 100 organically. But if you bid high enough on keywords, you could be listed first in the paid listings. So as you can see, the two work together but one is not dependent on the other.
As for tips, let’s start with SEO first. If you’re on a tight budget, as many beginning marketers are, this is the way you want to go. You can actually get a good ranking without ever having to spend a dime on advertising. By optimizing your site as best as you can, writing articles, submitting press releases, making videos, bookmarking and getting backlinks, you can easily conquer even the toughest niches. If money is tight and time is not a problem, this is the way to go.
However, if time is at a premium and money is no object, then there is no quicker way to get traffic than through SEM. A paid ad that appears at the top of the paid listings can bring you hundreds of visitors a day IF the demand for those keywords is there. As I said, you can be on page 100 organically and it won’t matter. However, IF you are going to go the SEM route, you want to make sure that you get a solid education on pay per click marketing before you tackle this beast. Many marketers have lost their shirts going the SEM route because they didn’t know what they were doing.
There you have it. The difference between SEO and SEM and some tips on using them both. Hopefully, you found this information useful.
To YOUR Success,
Steven Wagenheim
Read MoreSearch Engine Optimization – Focus on What You Can Control
Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to the practice of driving organic (aka “non-paid) traffic to a web site by obtaining higher search engine rankings for targeted keywords and phrases. Unfortunately, ranking factors (and the weight given to each by the various search engines) continue to change and evolve over time. Therefore, it is next to impossible to know with any certainty what the future may hold when it comes to search engine optimization.
However, there are a few basic SEO principles that have stood the test of time, so it is worth understanding how they work. To illustrate, let’s assume you sell equestrian products online. Of course, you want potential customers to find your site and the products you have to offer. So, you do some keyword research and develop a list of 10 keywords or phrases related to your main product lines. For example, you might decide terms like “equine fly masks” or “Ariat paddock boots” look promising because your research shows that a large number of people are searching for those terms and the competition for the top spots on the first page of Google isn’t too overwhelming.
On-Page Factors: Laying the Groundwork
From a search engine optimization perspective, your main goal is to alert the search engines that your site offers relevant information related to your targeted keywords. With respect to our example, you could start by creating and optimizing a page on your site for the term, “equine fly masks.” You will want to include this term in the title tag, H1 headline tag, and image alt tags if applicable. Plus, be sure to sprinkle the term throughout the content of your article, but don’t overdo it. Remember, you are writing for a human audience, NOT search engine spiders. If you keep your content focused on your visitors by answering questions, addressing concerns or solving problems -you’ll do great.
Off-Page Factors: Driving It Home
Once you take care of everything you can with respect to your own site, it is time to start focusing on the off-page factors that affect search engine optimization. One of the most important things you can do in this regard is to develop quality incoming backlinks to your site. Once you create enough great content, this will start to occur naturally because other site owners will link to your site as a resource for their readers. However, you can’t sit back and wait for this to happen by itself or you might be waiting a long time for the results you want.
Instead, you will want to focus on building quality links from as many respected sites as you can. Article marketing, guest blogging, and commenting on relevant blogs and forums are all ways to build these valuable online assets for your business. While you are at it, be sure to use anchor text links for your targeted keywords whenever possible. In other words, instead of using an exposed url when linking to your page about equine fly masks, you would hyperlink the term “equine fly masks” to your page about that topic. The use of anchor text links is a great way to let search engines know a site or page is about a particular topic.
The world of search engine optimization is constantly evolving. However, if you stay focused on the things you can control, you can achieve great results.
Read MoreSitemaps and Submissions
You must continue this process of constantly updating/rewriting your site copy so that the major search engines will respider your site, which is called “reindexing,” because the spider robots, Googlebots and other web crawlers (of any search engines where you’ve already submitted the site) will eventually discover and mark all of the changes. They go for it, keeping it up on a regular basis, and this causes people to see your website – not to mention your latest updated copy of it. The various search engines reflect your changes in their own ways.
Google will mark any daily changes on a daily basis, even marking changes you make more frequently than daily. MSN and Yahoo, however, have tended to mark changes over longer time periods, such as every few months or quarterly. They will not respider your site for every little change. But you can get your results refreshed on a daily basis or even more often with Google. To reindex your site means that the search engines are sending out their little machines to go over your site and notice any changes in it. They are generally looking for major changes, such as fresh content, major rearrangements to your site, and brand new pages. Google, however, will reindex you even for minor changes, such as to one single line of text copy.
The last I have heard, the older your site is and the more pages it contains, with as few outgoing links as possible (no more than 50 per page) and the more relevant incoming links it has coming into it, the more Google will respect it and move it up in the organic SERPs. You must also create an XML sitemap for your site. And when you add new pages to your website, Google Sitemaps provides you with help when it comes to reindexing the sitemap for your site. When you make a Google sitemap, you lay out several details about the content of your web pages, and you can get Google to download the changes as reflected by your sitemap on a regular basis; constantly, if the pages are continuously changing, daily, weekly, or even monthly.
Please look into this very worthwhile program for all of the details on how to properly make a sitemap for your site at Google Webmaster Tools. You will need a Google account, which you can get completely for free, to use this service. And you will need to create a sitemap for your website which will list every page in it. It’s best to create an RSS sitemap, an Atom sitemap and an ROR (resource of resources) sitemap for your site, and then to submit the RSS sitemap to Google and also to MSN Webmaster Center and Yahoo Site Explorer.
You can have an XML sitemap generated for you at Automapit.com and many other different online services completely for free. I suggest also getting an Atom version and the ROR version done, too. I would suggest reading my article “You Need RSS, Atom and ROR XML Codes on Your Website!” over at Ezine Articles for advice on how to proceed. Google “free sitemap generator” etc. in order to find services where you can get all of these done.
Every time you make a change to your website or any of its inner pages, you must resubmit your sitemap to Google, Yahoo and MSN. When you sign up for their webmaster and site submit services, there will be links around your site where you can go and resubmit the sitemap. You must update your sitemap or use code in your website that updates your sitemap whenever you republish any of the pages, as the sitemap must update each page. You should have someone hand-resubmit the sitemap in each of the major search engine’s webmaster tools.
If you submit your website and even its specific internal pages to many search engines, preferably the greatest amount possible, you will get massive exposure for your site when it climbs up to the higher rankings as listed on each of these engines. It’s not enough to only submit your site to search engines, as you should also submit to directories and other services such as posting to blogs; but it’s the only way to start when it comes to your site eventually climbing its way up each of the search engine’s rankings for your site.
And if you submit your site to as many of the major search engines as possible twice per month (I recommend doing this on the 5th and 25th day of the month), you will get maximum results from this. It is only the first major step, but it is the only way you will be seen by visitors who use search engines to find your site. Then as you resubmit your site twice per month, it will most likely be reindexed by the search engines, and each change you make will be updated by the major ones and probably also by many of the minor ones as well.
You must research search engine submission services. One thing you DON’T want to do is to submit to thousands of FAA (free for all) pages, however. These sites are trashy and only list your link for a little while at the top of the page. The best search engines to submit to are the major ones and as many of the minor ones that aren’t FAA that you can access. It only costs a little for a one-time submittal to hundreds of search engines, and it will get your site’s link “out there” broadly if you do this. Also, you want to find search engines, blogs and other services listing your business specialties (freelance writing, ghostwriting, book publishing, etc.) and submit to them for higher quality inbound links.
Read MoreHow to Use Website Traffic to Earn Money
If you have a blog or a website that you maintain as a hobby and have already built up a steady stream of website traffic without really promoting your site, did you know that you can earn money from this website traffic that you have built up?
This situation that you are in is an ideal example of generating income from something you do on the side for fun. The best thing about it is that you do not have to have any technical knowledge to monetize the web traffic coming to your site.
One way you can earn money from your website traffic is by joining an ad network and putting a script on your site that generates pay-per-click ad boxes on your site. An example of such ad networks is Google AdSense. These ad boxes can be tweaked so their appearance will blend with your overall site design. You get paid every time someone clicks on these ads from your site.
Another way to monetize your web traffic is to rent out your virtual real estate space to advertisers and put up banner ads. You can lay out these banner ads as a decorative accent to your site if you want. Just make sure that your advertisers do not include malicious script in their ads that can harm your readers. Also, try not to put up banner ads that are too flashy and annoying.
A third way to generate income from your web traffic is to join an affiliate program. In affiliate marketing, you promote other people’s products on your website by putting up links to your affiliate partner’s website, writing the occasional product review, among other things. Amazon.com has a reputable affiliate program that you can be part of. You can also find affiliate programs in ClickBank.net.
These are just three examples of how you can make money from your website traffic. When you monetize your web traffic, your hobby is no longer something that you do just for fun but also for earning some extra cash.
Read MoreOnline Traffic – Targeted Tools
Online traffic systems.
Which do you want? —paid traffic or free traffic.
Paid traffic means you are paying visitors to visit your site.
The system is that you pay by clicks on your AdWords ads, or you pay for clicks on your banners or other sites you might have. There are other ways of paid traffic, and you have the opportunity of choosing the country’s you want to target.
With paid traffic you get visitors instantly, but when you stop paying your visits cease instantly.
With free traffic, you do not pay for your visitors. There are many internet marketing tools that you can use to get visits to your site. All for free.
Keywords, articles, press releases, blogs, and videos can be powerful tools for online marketing.
Whether you choose paid traffic or free traffic in submitting you ads, keywords are very important to attract traffic to your site. With the right keywords relevant to your subject, you could end up on the front page of Google. This is the ultimate goal for all internet marketers; free targeted traffic to your site every day and visitors that you want to enjoy the benefits of your business.
Find the right keywords, and the clicks and traffic to your site will reward you, and will not cost you a cent. Free traffic.
It doesn’t matter what niche you are targeting for your business, free online traffic system is essential to get to number 1 page of Google and so get that flood of free traffic to grow your business.
Why do so many people fail at internet marketing? One reason is that they do not research for the keywords that will get the search engines to their site.
Having put time and effort into writing and submitting the article you want results, good keywords will do that and reward you with free traffic.
Read More