What is the difference between SEO and SEM. How are they similar and how are they different. What happens if you have one and not the other? There are a ton of questions about SEO and SEM. Many of which you can get by searching the web. But some companies try to sell you multiple packages, that really should be one package.
What is SEM?
SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing. What does this mean? What does it entail? What should you expect? Well first off I will break the ice. SEO is involved in SEM. SEM is kind of the parent to all online marketing needs. This could be anything from SEO, SEM, PPC, Google Adwords, Custom Web Addresses, Local SEO, Mobile Marketing, and many more. So if you go to a online marketing company and you want to get SEM done to your website. That could be a ton of different things.
What is SEO?
SEO is search engine optimization. For the most part SEO is just the marketing optimization of your individual pages. This could include keywords, titles, descriptions, page text optimization, and more.
What is PPC?
PPC is a pay per click campaign. This could be from multiple ppc companies and is probably the quickest way to build traffic from search engines. The most notable ppc is definitely Google Adwords.
What is Custom Web Addresses?
Custom web addresses entails optimizing you pages url. The more optimized your page urls are the better and easier search engine can find you. You may see some urls that look like this http://www.domain.com/XXXXXXXXX1111111. Just a bunch of non since after the base url. The best thing would be if the text after the base url made since. For instance this page you will see it is http://www.domain.com/seo-vs-sem. It really tells you what the page is and tells search engines.
Many More
There are a ton of other Marketing techniques that can be done to optimize your website so that you show up better in Search Engines. If you need to know more about Marketing Online please I would recommend you to go over to Marketer Matt. He offer a ton of different Online Marketing and Optimization techniques. I hope that this has helped you in your pro-suite to building a better website.