SEO and SEM Explained By a Dummy!

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website and individual web pages friendly to the search bots (spiders) and the human reviews of web pages and sites for the directories. This is a simple fact: if your webpage does not rank in the top 20 for your keywords you dont have a website, what you have instead is a very expensive electronic broacher. Lots of people think that if you have your brother in law put some keywords into the meta tags that is all that there is too it. Which would be the same as your neighbor knows some first aid, so you go to him for a triple bypass surgery, sounds ludicrous, but I see people that believe that and bet their online presence on it. If SEO were that easy it would be great, however that is not the case.

Here is a very simplified breakdown of SEO. The URL is to the title, which is to the description, which is to the headings, and the headings are to the alt tags, and then keywords, keyword phrases and proper keyword density in the content. The headings, the title, the alt tags and the URL have the keywords and keyword phrases incorporated into them, followed by the bottom header of the title again and find links. Oh and make it look natural. A good SEO person can and will spend up to an hour just on a description for a single page to get it correct and that doesnt even appear on what you see on the page when you view it. They will also spend hours researching what your keywords and keywords phrases should be in order to maximize the number of qualified eyeballs that land on your page. A Qualified eyeball is someone likely to take action in a way that you want like buying something or giving you their contact information so that you can follow up and fulfill the objective that you had in mind when you built the site.

Search Engine Marketing grew out of SEO basically it combines SEO with Pay Per Click(PPC) , Pay per Impression and link strategies that come in a lot of different varieties. The idea here is too buy yourself links and high placement for your keywords in order to improve the relevance and organic rankings in the search engines, while at the same time drive traffic to the site if it sounds hard to do it is and that is why it is one of the hottest tech careers right now. Google AdWords would be the number one PPC followed by in no particular order MSN Ad Center and one of the originals, Overture which is part of Yahoo Search Marketing now. There are some smaller ones in the arena as well; AdBrite, Knoodle and 7Search are a few of the smaller ones out there. One of the most popular linking strategies now would be blogs and researching sites that are relevant to your site, and asking for a link.

A whole new area is also coming into the main stream conscience now which would be the social networking sites like Flicker, You Tube and My Space. Reciprocal linking was all the rage for a while; however it has fallen out of favor as a reciprocal links will balance each other out. A tried and true way of getting links is writing good copy that has value to others, and then they will want to link to you, like writing articles on areas that you are a expert on like this one.

Fred Tittle has lived and worked in holiday vacation resorts his entire life, from Lake Genevas Playboy Club, as a rock jock for KSPN FM in Aspen Colorado, he became a PADI Pro Scuba Diver in Hawaii, diving on Maui, Kauai, Kona on the big island, and Waikiki on Oahu. He now owns EcoSea Dive in Sihanoukville Cambodia where he teaches SSI and PADI scuba diving courses and runs liveaboards in the gulf of Thailand and Asia adventure tours, http://www.ecosea.com

Freds new project http://www.CheapCharliesHotels.com where he reviews cheap hotels, budget guesthouses, discount accommodations and cheap international flights, but is really an excuse to go scuba diving on vacation more, China is up next.