Many folks are confused by all the new terms related to Search Marketing. Two TLAs (three letter acroynyms) that come up very often and get confused are SEO and SEM. It is important to understand because otherwise you might look like deer in the headlight. You could end up hiring somebody to do SEM for you and then not understand why you are not showing up in the top search positions organically.

 SEM refers to paid advertising running on search engines like Google. The graphic belows demonstrates where these are visually on the page. You pay for these positions but they still have to be relevant to what the person is searching on.

SEO is the practice of tweaking your website content and getting as many backlinks to your website as possible to improve your organic search results.

If you are looking for a firm to manage these for you, you may want to get two seperate companies. These are highly specialized and very few companies do both well.