seo, sem, ppc, where do I start?
Acronyms. They are a funny thing. Increasingly a part of life and if you dont know your RAM from your jam these days you are really at a disadvantage!
As the whole arena of search engine optimization services is relatively new to most people, a lot of the time you hear or see discussion going on about seo that should be sem, or ppc being labelled seo and so on. Well, they are relatively easy to differentiate BUT given the close correlation between the different “disciplines” of the subject many people confuse them.
SEO - Search Engine Optimisation (or optimization if you are US based!) is the art of making sure that a website is as optimised as possible for search engine spiders to correctly gather all of the data that the site contains, and trying to ensure that the relevant pages on the site are returned when a search is displayed. Having your site optimized for search positioning is of absolute importance, as a site with poor optimisation it would be akin to a great brochure for your company, but no distribution. People will not find your companies website if it is not well optimized (hence positioned well) for search engines to spider correctly.
PPC - Pay Per Click Advertising, is the methodology of promoting your company on search engines and web portals, by means of paying for the results that the advertiser produces, ie. directly paying for a “click” or a person actually visiting your site. Pay per click advertising is the number one revenue stream for all search engines today, and in the UK google have for the first time in 30 years usurped ITV1’s positioning as the number one advertising revenue generating company, which is a true reflection on the maturing of the internet advertising industry.
SEM - Search Engine Marketing, is either pure SEO, PPC, or more often a combination of the two disciplines to give an overall “marketing” or means of achieving good search engine positioning, using the whole range of ways that a search engine can bring you exposure.
So, next time you use the acronyms, you should know which is which!
off for my cafe con leche!
MM
Comments
Leave a Reply