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Showing posts from September 29, 2014

SEO vs. SEM: the Real War for Top Placement

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Forget net neutrality, there's a bigger war taking place online today. It's the battle between search engine optimization (SEO) versus search engine marketing (SEM) to get to the top of the search engine result pages (SERP). And the most shocking thing about it is most business leaders don't realize that the two practices are working against each other. Wait a second? Did he just say SEO and SEM compete against each other? Yep. Most companies erroneously use the terms interchangeably which is at the crux of the problem. So let's first start with an explanation of terms. SEO is a practice of tailoring or "optimizing" the contents of your websites, landing pages, pdfs, videos, and social media posts so that your brand (product, service, company, or client) comes up at the top (or close to it) when someone performs a search. While SEM is the practice of bidding on placement of your brand in the designated marketing areas of a search engine and/or their part