Happy new year everyone! Here is the answer to the question of the week.

Keyword advertising, also known as PPC (or pay per click) advertising, is placing ads in search engine results. You can buy your ad’s position on the search results page for any keyword or keyword phrase. You pay a predetermined amount every time someone clicks on your ad. The ad cost varies depending on the popularity of the keywords you have selected.

SEO is short for search engine optimization. This is the practice of making your website search engine friendly.  SEO is done to improve the volume and quality of traffic to a website from search engines organic (or unpaid) search results. Your site can be optimized around the keyword phrases that relate the most to your service or product. An optimized site is easily indexed by the major search engines and will rank higher in the organic or non-paid search engine results in time.  So when someone searches for something you offer on Google, your site might appear at the top of the organic results. This could bring lots of web traffic to your site. However, having an optimized site does not guarantee you top position in the search results.

As you can see, keyword advertising and SEO are very different things. One is not better than the other. Marketing your website requires using a variety of techniques including keyword advertising and SEO. SEM or search engine marketing encompasses all the methods used to promote your website. SEM includes both search engine optimization (SEO) and search advertising, or paid search. An example of an SEM method is building links to your site from other sites. With the proper use of SEM techniques, your site will rise in the unpaid ranking results as well as the paid and your site traffic will increase.

Are you interested in improving your website’s search engine marketing? Call us at 888.412.7469 for more information on how we can help. Click here to visit our site to learn more about us.