Search Engine Optimisation (Optimization) and Marketing

There is alot of stuff said about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). Over the last 12 months I have been slowly getting to grips with the process of optimising a web site to get the best possible ranking on a search engine.

At the bottom of this page are some Search Engine Optimisation resources that may help you understand the whole process of SEO and SEM a little better. They offer some good SEO advice and, most importantly, are run by ethical SEO experts.

Ethical SEO experts?

Yes, ethical. You see, the world of Search Engine Optimisation and Marketing is full of what we like to call Spammers and Scammers. They prey on the mystery that surrounds Search Engines and work on the fact that most people know they need to do something to help their web site, but they aren't really sure what. These unscrupulous companies employ various tricks to get a page highly ranked within a search engine. Their methods may well work for a time but eventually they get found out and the sites they promote get dropped by the Search Engine and no longer appear anywhere in the rankings.

I used the word "tricks" and therein lies the reason they get dropped. The Search Engines are in the business of presenting the most accurate results possible based on a search term. The results need to be useful to the person searching or there was no point in them using the Search Engine to begin with. If a Search Engine consistently delivers poor results then users will go elsewhere. This is why Search Engine companies are constantly revising their methods in order to purge their indexes of sites that don't deserve to be there.

So what's the solution? That's easy. Don't use tricks. Don't lie to the Search Engines. Be honest, be straight. Present meaningful content, organised in a logical manner. Create sites that are genuinely useful for people and don't make sites that deliberately try to cheat a Search Engine into thinking it is more than it actually is.

So what is the difference between SEO and SEM?

Search Engine Optimisation is the "art" of designing and building a web page or web site in such a way that it stands the best chance possible of performing well in Search Engine Rankings (SERPS).

It may sound simple, but in reality many people really fall badly on this. The way I explain this is to imagine an absolutely basic web page. Just the pure text and links. Now, the more stuff I put on top of this, the more I am creating obstacles for a Search Engine Crawler to successfully and accurately index the content of the page and be able to move on to more pages within the web site.

Search Engine Marketing is the process of publicising your website by means of directory and advertising programmes such as Pay Per Click (PPC) schemes and Pay For Inclusion (PFI) schemes. As you can see, Search Engine Optimisation is a part of Search Engine Marketing.

In that case what's this PPC and PFI stuff?

Pay per click advertising simply means that you sign up to an advertising programme that places your ads on other websites. When a user clicks your ad, you get charged and amount of money. This is normally done on a "bid" basis where you decide how much you want to pay for each click. The ads are then prioritised based on the amount being paid, i.e. the ad that is paying the most gets prime position. Probably the most popular example of this kind of plan would be Google AdSense.

Paid for Inclusion, on the other hand is a scheme that includes a listing to your site in a directory, possibly even an ad. IT does not guarantee your position in the listings, just that you get listed somewhere. Examples of Paid For Inclusion might be the Yahoo Directory.

More to come soon...

SEO Resources