With the internet rapidly increasing in popularity and accessibility, a war has begun over placement in the search engines. Although this war is being fought with code and the battlefield is often times peoples basements, the SEO/SEM war effects all of us somehow. The terms SEO and SEM are becoming more commonplace and are increasing in value to businesses around the globe. So What exactly are SEO and SEM you may ask. Put simply,they are the combined efforts of programming and marketing to effect the placement of a website in search engine results. Most people do not care how their SEO/SEM works, just that it indeed works. However, there are a few basic terms and techniques that you should know about. Having some education about SEO and SEM will help you make educated decisions when choosing a web development company.

Some misconceptions about SEO and SEM

I hear an awful lot of people saying that their sites are optimized and that they are actively marketing their website on the internet. The reality of it is that they almost always have room for improvement. One of the things that I see quite a bit is “meta tags” on a page, but no other optimization. What really bugs me is that anyone with notepad and an ftp client can insert meta tags and call it SEO, but if the simple things, like image alt tags, good anchor naming, good site maps, and relevant content is not done, then you really are not fully optimized. When it comes to the SEM side, of course this information changes daily, but here are a few things that people hear from their SEO people, that is just not true anymore. It takes money to get on page one of a search engine. NOT TRUE, if your web people tell you this, leave them. That is 100% free, for now. It cost money to keep you on page one. Also, not true. Anyone who tells you that once you reach a desired rank in your keyword set, then they have to pay someone is just not right. Now, there is some labor involved, so they should bill accordingly, but they are not cutting a check to Google unless they are doing sponsored ads.

Some Vocabulary

Search Engine Marketing: Involves submission and promotion to search engines, creating links to and from other websites, promoting within online social networks. Searchengineguide.com’s Definition.

Search Engine Optimization: Typically is the way that a website is coded to be more visible to Search Engines. This usually includes utilizing and improving META tags, keywords, site layout, image format, and internal link structure. Wikipedia Definition.

World Wide Web Consortium: W3C for short a community of web programmers and code enthusiasts who are involved in setting code standards. Learn about W3C.

Page Rank: One of Googles ways of rating a website on a scale of 1 to 10.

Meta Tags: Snippets of code, often found in the beginning of a website, which are visible to the search engines, but not to the reader, which lets the search engines know what a website contains.

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