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Any business manager or entrepreneur who has only recently come to view online marketing as a “serious” channel for product promotion has surely come across the frustratingly frequent use of the terms SEO and SEM. These are two terms that are frequently thrown around yet rarely explained in conversations, in magazine articles, or on internet blogs and websites. This article will attempt to familiarize you, in brief, with the general idea of Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

The concept of Search Engine Marketing evolved near the turn of the millennium with the introduction of powerful search engines such as Google and Yahoo. Search Engine Marketing, or SEM as it is better known, is defined by the New York Times as “the practice of buying paid search listings”.
Examples of Search Engine Marketing include pay per click programs such as Google AdWords, which associates the keywords in search strings with the websites of its clients. When the user enters a particular search string, then along with the search results, the clients’ advertisements are displayed. The idea behind it is to direct the clients’ traffic towards their websites. However, SEM is often misinterpreted as being synonymous with pay per click advertising, whereas this is in reality only one aspect of it. For instance, a key aspect of SEM is Search Engine Optimization, according to Danny Sullivan who proposed the term in 2001.
You need to differentiate between SEO and SEM – since they are not the same thing. SEO is basically the techniques used to optimize your site for search engines, making them appear in the top few search results by the engine. SEO is achieved by heavily optimizing your site with keywords and by building an intricately connected linking structure. On the other hand, SEM is achieved by using search engines for advertising purposes.
To ensure effective search engine marketing, therefore, it is imperative that you understand fully the range of activities covered by the term, master each one independently, and ensure their full and optimum use as part of your online marketing strategy.
You placed in search results via SEM by paid placement, contextual advertising and paid inclusion.