SEO and SEM: One and the same thing?

I’m sure you all are aware of SEO and SEM and know what they do. There is a debate about the actual purpose of both and whether they are same or are two different methods meant for the same thing. It is believed that both are a part of internet marketing and are meant to increase site visibility and traffic. It is true to some extent. But, actually there is a big difference between the two. Not that one is free and other is paid, that is very obvious and not needed to be pointed out. Here is the real picture of the two.

Internet marketing consists of SEO, SEM and SMO. This was initially. Now, SEM is the sole technique left. SEO is a part of SEM now which does the same thing, but for free listings. And SMO is now a part of SEO. So, the whole picture is:

SEM

|

SEO

|

SMO

The whole process of SEM is to increase visitors and traffic for a website. It works towards this target through paid listings, i.e. the sponsored listings on Google, Yahoo and Bing come through SEM. There are no free methods involved here. SEM includes PPC and CPC and it’s about running and managing a campaign for which one needs to pay.

SEO, on the other hand works toward the same target of increasing visitors and traffic, but with all the free methods. No payment is required to be made for any method. The site visibility is increased by building free links, directory submissions, article submissions, blog commenting, bookmarking, forum postings, etc. Now, it also includes social media techniques like, Facebook and Twitter profile creation and optimization, business profile management, etc. All these methods are free and result in site appearing in the first page of search engine. This is targeted towards getting listings in normal listings.

SEO not only increases visitors, but also the keyword ranking and site Page Rank. SEM, on the other hand, focuses more on traffics. That is why, 70 percent of traffic is brought by SEM and SEO contributes only 30 percent. So, actually what the reality is that SEM is the main technique – a bigger platform which includes SEO.