SEM or SEO?

After awhile all the letters start sound alike.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the broad term used to describe the efforts to drive traffic to your site. While Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are tactics to make your site more web search friendly to increase organic (non paid) rankings, SEO is a subset of SEM.

In addition to SEO, SEM includes Paid Inclusion -

• Banner Ads
• Pay Per Click

The advantage is paid inclusion immediately generates traffic to your site. However, if clicks don’t turn into sales, then paid inclusion can be very expensive. Any paid inclusion campaign should be monitored closely and measured regularly to insure there is a return on investment. Many companies have specialist who will help you set up campaigns and establish budgets. Their advice can be quite helpful.

The one thing to be careful of is allowing these companies to automatically reload your account. If you’re not paying attention, you can end up with huge charges to your credit card. I prefer to turn off that setting (not all companies allow you to do that – red flag in my book) and manually reload the account when the balances are used up.