Differences Between SEM and SEO Experts

Internet marketing or online advertising is ripe with terms that we obviously have heard of very often - Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The extent to which these terms are popular and widely used is highly contrasting to the level of awareness and understanding that people have about them,109, especially how these terms are different.

Let us try to understand how SEM and SEO compare with each other in terms of implementation and what different skill the experts in each field are expected and required to have,102.

First the Definition:

SEM as it is popularly referred to is related to displaying advertisement, mostly in form of some text, accompanied with the results shown on a search engine. E.g,104. you must have noticed the text advertisements that are displayed either at the top or on the right column of a search result page of a search engine such as Google, Bing etc,102. Such advertisements are popularly known as sponsored links.

On the other hand, Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the procedure of designing and programming your web page or web site such that it fetches a higher rank in the list of search-engine results.

Desired Skill Set for SEO and SEM Experts

As we now understand that while SEO is more a technical or procedural application and SEM is more related to planning,107, an SEO expert is required to have deeper knowledge about web designing and an SEM expert requires a broader understanding to the overall online advertising domain,105.

Talking about technical requirements, an SEO expert required to have skill such as web designing,107, programming and software,105, and knowledge of search-engine technologies. An SEM expert may not require such extensive technical skills but should rather have advertising and marketing skills.

The two fields also differ in terms of the time period required for each to show results,108. While search engine marketing may provide you instant results and returns,109, whereas search-engine-optimization is a comparatively long term process as search-engines take time in analyzing and indexing your websites.

If you are a new-fangled to the Internet marketing, you possibly will have a number of questions concerning the differences between seo & sem. Well, these interior marketing subjects are really in fact very different. However they share a few amount of similarities too.

Other difference lies in the fact that a Search Engine Optimization expert doesn't have to deal with the search-engine administration directly as most of his activity are is the web page or web site that he is designing and building. A Search Engine Marketing expert has to deal with the search engine administration directly as he may have to plan what advertisements have to be displayed, what will be the associated costs, and what factors will determine the display of the advertisements.

As we can understand, a Search-Engine-Marketing expert has to take more of managerial and business level decisions whereas a Search-Engine-Optimization expert has to be more technical and scientific in his approach.

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