DJ Website Designer Todd Donald
Specializing in SEO DJ Websites and SEO DJ Web Design.
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The Difference Between SEO and SEM
How To Get Great Search Results
Trying to achieve high relevancy for any particular search phrase, (especially one that consists of a combination of very generic terms), is extremely difficult.
Having a site that shows up good on search engines is great, but will this help you get more traffic to your site? Better organic search results CAN bring your site more traffic, but it's a slow process. If you need more immediate TRAFFIC to get your phone ringing, you may want to use SEM, (Search Engine Marketing), in combination with SEO, (search engine optimization) efforts.
What's The Difference Between SEO and SEM? Even with the correct software and hosting, trying to achieve high relevancy for any particular search phrase, (especially one that consists of a combination of very generic terms like dj + wedding), is extremely difficult. In general, nobody can determine what keyword, or key phrase a site will appear for, nor can a site be designed or optimized to target key phrases... Anyone or any company claiming they can control organic search relevancy is either lying, crazy, badly misinformed or all three of those.
Here's how it really works: A site gets submitted to a search engine and hopefully is included in their index, (not all sites are included at search engines). If the search engine includes it, then it will get crawled and the URL's, Meta's and Body Content (text), within the site gets catalogued and relevancy for future search phrases is determined by highly complex software that uses a myriad of factors to determine relevance. No two search engines do this the same way. No one, but the search engines know how this works. The algorithms, or rules constantly change so nobody can manipulate search results. For this reason, sites that perform well are built well and promoted well. However even a site that seemingly performs well for various popular search phrases, is only showing up because of it's perceived relevance by the search engine. It's nothing that anyone else, whether a web designer or SEO guru can determine or control.
Ways to get sites showing up better on search engines:
- White Hat SEO - This is what I do and is a method which is recommended and accepted by all search engines. Often times White Hat SEO specialists are called "purists", because they work on the fundamental aspects of what makes a site "on-topic" and relevant. This is entirely done from the ground-up and includes everything from the basic HTML coding, to proper layout and construction of a site, to the meta tags, alt tags and of course the content, which is all designed to be "on-topic" and customer-centric or narrowly focused to help the end user - the site visitor + good solid long term linking strategy to increase reach and page rank. All of this is what search engines "WANT" to better enable them to deliver relevant search results. White Hat SEO is helpful for long term exposure and success for truly on-topic sites. In your critique which I supplied, I suggested several ways to improve your site with White Hat SEO techniques.
- Black Hat SEO - I personally do not do Black hat SEO, but some companies and so-called SEO gurus do... It's all based on here-say or tricks that seem to make sites appear relevant for certain phrases at the time... Sometimes the flavor of the month is keyword stuffing, or hidden text, "google-bomb" type text links, or gateway pages and other techniques which are frowned on and often times banned by search engines. Those who do Black hat SEO may also use SEO Software to examine competitive websites and try to mimic what they have done. Black Hat SEO is often what you'll find talked about among self proclaimed search engine experts, gets hyped up and broadcast in forums and emails, or gets sold in the form of "search optimization software" or ebooks etc., but is rarely if ever discussed among White Hat SEOs, because anything that's SEO legitimate can be accessed for free right at Google by looking at their guidelines and terms of service.
- Search Engine Marketing or "SEM" - This is what some companies and firms or individual site owners do to take advantage of the paid inclusion advertising options made available by search engines. This is a way to increase the exposure of a site that could not otherwise show up as relevant by itself due to poor design, lack of on-topic content, etc. SEM is essentially the opposite of SEO, but still widely used and accepted because this is what provides search engines the cash-flow to operate. For example Google started as a completely "ad-free" site which operated solely on it's ability to deliver very accurate organic results. After several years once they proved their search software was valuable and popular, they incorporated sponsored or paid ads, so that the company could survive and eventually thrive. SEM is very useful for sites built with Flash, (because it's the only way a Flash site will show up in a search engine), Database or Dynamic Content sites, and until recently PHP sites. SEM or Pay Per Click is what can bring you traffic for certain key phrase terms, without doing anything to your site to make it more relevant for those desired terms. You can bid on any term you want, (even trademarked terms and business names). You set your own budget, but in order for your ad to be seen the bidding is sometimes pricey and you can expect to pay $3 or more for one click based on a common key phrase. When using SEM it's important to understand "how much" every visitor to your site is "worth". For example, if you need 1000 visitors to generate 1 booking, and that 1 booking creates $100 profit for you, than each visitor is worth a maximum of 10 cents. If you spend more than 10 cents for each visitor, you will lose money instead of making money.
Hope that information about SEO, SEM and PPC helps! For the BEST long term results, you want White hat SEO... That's what I do. The process of "getting seen" in search engines does take several weeks or months however. Even after the site gets included and crawled by search engines, there is no "magic" that makes your site show up good. It's completely based on the topic of your site and how it is attracting end-users. If you need traffic right away or for a particular key phrase or key word you think will help you get more business, I would recommend the PPC and other paid ads at DJ Directories and Wedding Sites to make your current site get more traffic and get the phone ringing, but if you've not purchased one of my sites yet, and still have a home made DJ site, or one that a "web designer" made, (as opposed to an SEO specialist), you need to give serious thought to setting aside a budget for a future new White hat SEO site that is built with industry standard solution, sports a good URL and is hosted at a reputable US based hosting service. © 2008 Todd Donald
