SEO Training

So you own a small business.  You probably have much larger competitors and gaining a foothold seems like a huge uphill battle.   Rejoice – the internet is here.

Competing as a small business can feel like an uphill battle, but the internet is the great leveler

The internet is the great leveler.  Contrary to the opinion of several women I know. . . .size does not matter.  What matters is how well you use the (largely free) resources at your disposal. A SMF can punch way beyond its weight online, helped by the fact that budgets are nothing like as large as those needed for traditional media.

Small business’ tend to be run by experts in their fields.  If you did not have unique selling points you would not be in business.  Those unique selling points may be superior service or a superior quality product.  You know it, you believe in it.  How do you get the world to sit up and take notice?

SEO is essential.  If your website cannot be found you will not gain any attention.  Further more, it is important that your website reflects your core values.  People buy from people.  This is still true on the internet.  You must make a personal connection.  A shoddy website will have all your hard earned visitors leaving as quickly as they arrived.

There is a temptation to use cheap web publishing services.

I am all for value, but not at the expense of professionalism.  Your website MUST reflect your business.

SEO is not rocket science.

A small amount of SEO training will get you a long way.  This is particularly true in the Irish market where there is far less competition.  A company with 3 employees can compete with a company with 300 employees with a little time and effort.

My small business does not have the budget for online services.

Here is where you have to ascertain how useful internet traffic can be to your business.  Your budget for advertising in traditional media is spent on what works for you.  The same rules apply to the internet.  There must be a return on investment.  The beauty of the internet is that shoestring budgets are often more than acceptable.  It all depends on the amount of time you and your staff can dedicate to promoting your business.  I have got business’ off the ground for under €3k.  That includes a SEO friendly website, online marketing training and a solid foundation in SEO theory and practice.  More than that, the full amount does not have to be paid up-front.

We at webshed believe in training for small business.  We can show you how to make the internet work for you.  This gives you control and reduces costly errors.

Small business owners are passionate about their companies.  This makes small business’ a joy to work with.  Enthusiasm is infectious.

Make an emotional connection with your customers . . . but overdoing it could get complicated!

SEO training rarely incorporates the word emotional.  It should.  Your website is your shop window online.  It is where you sell your products and services.  It is where you market your ideas to a much larger audience than your actual shop (if you have one).

So how does the word emotional fit with SEO?  SEO is search engine optimisation.  It is making your website accessible for robots.  Not humans.  It works too.  Get it right and you will soon gain traffic through increased search engine rankings.  SEO is cold though.  It is concerned with keyword ratios, link text, and other non-human-friendly terms.

If you want to sell to search engines then SEO is for you.

If however you want to sell to a real live human being you are going to have to make some changes.  You have to reach a human emotionally.  Let me give you an example.  I want to sell SEO training.  I’m good at it and my customers get return on their investment.  Thus my prime keyword for this site is “SEO training”.  How do I write that to attract customers but keep my SEO efforts intact?

• Keyword – SEO training
• Search engine friendly – SEO training
• Customer and SEO friendly – Holistic SEO training – taking the pain out of connecting with your customers.

There are lots of other phrases that appeal to us people on an emotional level:-

• Liberate your website with Holistic SEO training
• Learn to love your website again
• Holistic SEO, Feelin’ good online
• Website Makeover – This time it’s personal

Different to the usual “Get first page on Google” offered by most SEO trainers.  Of course I could use that too.  The point is not to lose sight of who your customers are.  You are connecting with one individual person when they land on your site.  Do you make them feel welcome or do you give them a FAB overview of your products with no feeling for them to connect with?

Web sites tend to be written by technical people.  Thus lots of websites are more like technical manuals than sales brochures.  Get your marketing department involved in your website.  If you do not have a marketing department, at least make sure you are using a web designer that understands marketing and selling.  Most of all make sure they understand people.  Every business is a people business – particularly online, where it is that bit harder to make a personal connection and build loyalty.

Online Marketing Forum

I have just created a brand new Online Marketing forum on my home site.  It will cover SEO at all levels, online and offline marketing and PR.  That’s just as a starting point.

I observed that while there is a huge interest in the business community regarding SEO and Online Marketing in general, there is a natural reluctance to ask questions to real life people.  I understand this completely.  Nobody likes to appear ill informed.  Social Media and SEO are relatively new fields though.  They are also fields where there is a lot of bad information available online.  Online Branding is a new concept to many businesses, particularly for SME’s.

SEO training and Social Media training are my own preferred areas, but while I can personally add a lot to the forum in these areas, I want people to freely express their own views in all areas.  The forum is to be a free information resource.

My purpose in creating the Online Marketing Forum, was to create an environment where people could ask the “silly questions” with a degree of anonymity.  It should also become a place where professionals can argue the pros and cons of their latest thinking.

The forum is brand new, so therefor it is fairly empty at the moment.  Don’t hold back.  If you are involved in Online Marketing or want to find out more about it then join it.  Post a question, comment or hypothesis.  This is a resource for you.  This is a free resource and while it is hosted on the Webshed site, I hope that it will be populated by professionals in competing companies as well as my own.

Directories are now about as much use for SEO as a telephone book

The internet is full of directories, and full of people offering services to include your site in all those directories.  They are of little use for SEO today, certainly when compared to Social Media as an SEO tool.

Going back just a few years businesses were going mad about directories.  Online budgets were being spent on premium placements and button and banner advertising.  Things change however.  Directories no longer hold the same power.  Google have even said that they will not be placing as much emphasis on dmoz (the mother of all directories).  This is because many sections are without editors and there has been widespread criticism of some editors.  It is something I noticed myself.  It can be extremely difficult to get a site listed on dmoz.  At best it can take months.

Am I saying not to bother with directories and to concentrate instead on Social Media?

Not quite.  When it comes to Google Local, the map results for businesses, local directories seem to hold some weight.  This is because Google is slow to trust submissions to Google Maps by businesses.  If the business address given on your contact page is the same as that listed in various local directories then it builds that all important trust.  It also helps to identify you as an actual local business.

The links from directories still hold some weight too, depending of course on the directory.  They just don’t help your SEO as much as they once did.

For my money, I’d rather invest in SEO training and in particular Social Media training than on expensive banner advertising on directories.

Niche directories are probably more useful than general directories now too.  This is because nobody really uses directories to find sites any more.  Search engines are just fine for that.  A niche directory however will get you targeted, specific results, and probably ranks better for whatever it is you are searching for than a generalist directory.  A good niche directory will hold information on the field too, rather than just being a list of businesses/ websites.

By the way, don’t bother with paid directory inclusion services, they are likely to do more harm than good!

Be My Valentine ... Google

With Valentines day fast approaching I started thinking about what is wrong with how we think about SEO and Google in particular.

With SEO training Google tends to be the main focus with clients.  They want to climb the Google ranks.  That is because in many ways Google is the only search engine that matters.  However, romancing Google is not how we should view SEO.

Saying “be my valentine” to Google is much akin to saying “be my valentine” to your sweethearts mother.  You will not get the girl/guy by focusing your affections on their mother.  You will get the cold shoulder.

In SEO circles there is much talk of getting some Google love. But Google doesn’t love.  Google rewards the love that others give you.  They reward the relationships you build with other users.  Google are blatantly open about this.  The first three Google webmaster guidelines for content and design deal with making your site easy to navigate, easy to find (sitemap) and creating useful and information rich pages.  In other words they are telling us that we should create websites for people and not search engines.

Our focus should not be on romancing Google, but on romancing visitors and other webmasters (all of whom are human).  Of course you have to keep your would be mother in law happy too.  There is no harm in being charming with Google, but the way to Google’s affections is to concentrate on your content and your visitors.

Unlike most mothers I know, Google is quite happy to see you “sowing your wild oats” with as many people, across as many sites as possible.  Rather than utter “be my valentine” to just one user, it pays to shout it out with gay abandon across the entire universe that is the internet.

If your heart is true (your content is fantastic), you will attract the affections (links) of users across the world.  Human nature being what it is, more links means more visitors.  Charisma is infectious.  Once you gain the affections of some of your users more will come, just because you appear popular.  It’s just like in school, when people want to be associated with the “in’ crowd.  They put effort into getting close to them, creating links with them and boosting themselves through association.  So what have the “in” crowd got in internet terms?  Nothing more than great content.

What makes great content is another discussion entirely.

Don’t be my valentine Google.  I prefer humans to algorithms.

What relationship does link positioning on external sites have with the effectiveness of a link for delivering results to your site? (I’m just going to stop for a breather after that horrible sentence… the rest will be better… honest)

Some would argue that links are links and you take them where you can get them.  Surely though it is smarter to try and get links that are actually worth something to your site – particularly if you were about to part with cash for them.  Onwards with our SEO training – Lets take a look at how the position of the link on the external site can have an effect on how effective the link is for you and your SEO.

It is important to note that positioning is just one element in the SEO equation.  We will look at others in future posts.

Link Positioning for SEO

Banner and button links: Google does not like paid links.  Banner, Skyscraper and button links are images.  This in itself is not bad.  There is little difference between a text link and alt text in a link.

What is bad is that the positioning of these elements is just about always the same on a site.  Worse still they often come with “Sponsored links” or some other such text in their vicinity.  That is like painting yourself yellow, wearing nothing but a pink tutu, and running past Google buildings shouting “I paid for a link” while a team push flyers with the details into the hands of everybody entering or leaving the building.   Obviously it’s the algorithms you have to worry about mainly (unless you get a personal review). A link to another site from a banner is therefore only worth the number of clicks you get from it.  Add in “ad blindness” and paying for a banner ad seems to make little sense in most cases.

In truth it probably won’t do you too much harm to buy button or banner ads, but it’s not likely to do you as much good as you would like in terms of SERPS.  That said, a nice banner ad on a popular and related site could get you enough click throughs to make it worthwhile.

Footer Links: This is one for you web designers.  You put your links onto every page you design…. in the footer.  It doesn’t do you any good.  Well, it doesn’t do you any good compared to having a nice link in the middle of the page copy.  The footer is also another place where advertising is often placed.  In short, don’t expect much from footer links – they do not work well.

Header Links: Links in the header are not a lot of use either, for much the same reasons.  In general the only links you ever see in headers are paid advertising.  The search engines know it.

Positioning in the source code structure: When your page is crawled, it is the source file that will be read.  Traditionally, important content would be placed as high up that code structure as possible.  This is because crawlers used to only crawl a proportion of each page.  Using CSS you can float the main column rather than the side bar, thus it is closer to the start of your code.  It is still worth doing this for other search engines, but not necessary for Google any more.  Google can understand your page layout (providing you keep to reasonable standards).  Thus positioning in the source code is not as important as positioning on the page.

Best position on the page for a link: I love in-text links.  I think that a good relevant link in the middle of a paragraph of relevant text is the bees knees.

Surrounding Text: What about the text surrounding a link?  I think that the surrounding text is quite important.  It helps to show context and is simply a way of telling dumb machines that it is less likely to be a spam link.

Blogrolls and other Site-wide links: It depends on the site, but having the same link on every page of a site is often not as good as a few links on relevant pages.  Firstly, Site-wide links may be confused with advertising, secondly, in my experience they are just not as good in many cases.  So, if somebody offers to put you in their blogroll, ask them for a link in a few individual blogs instead.  You can ask for a few, because it will probably seem to them like they are giving you something less important.  Get some blogging training and start making great quality links for yourself.

The ideal place for a link on an external site: The perfect link position in my book is in the center of the page (in the main body of text), as near as possible to the top of the page, with relevant surrounding text and good keyword use.

Links are less useful if:-

• The link is in the header or footer sections of the page.
• The link is in a list of unrelated links.
• The page is badly formed (broken source code)
• The link is in Javascript
• It is an image link that has no alt text (makes it nearly entirely useless)

When it comes to training someone on link building, there are a lot of factors that go into what makes a good link.  The page positioning on the external site is just one of the factors that play a role in how effective your SEO is.

Search engine optimisation relies on a wide range of factors (there are over 200 elements taken into account by Google when analysing a page).  The wonderful thing about SEO is that even by paying attention to just a few you can make a positive change to your site.

Use internal links to chain your site together and make it work as one unit

One of the things I forgot to mention when I was talking about on-page SEO was internal linking.  This was very remiss of me so I thought I should cover it immediately.

Internal linking is the practice of creating links in your text that point to other pages on your site.  It is a part of SEO training that is often not covered.

Why use internal links?  After all you have a navigation menu so what use are more links to the same pages?  Navigation does not generally allow you use the keywords you would like a page to be found for.  The “home” navigation item is a prime example.  You could forgo the word “home” and put in something that relates to the actual page, but that would be at odds with good heuristics (ease of use) for your user.  Visitors to a website expect to see a home page.  So we need to give it to them.  The trouble is that the word “home” does nothing as far telling a search engine what the page is about (unless you have a property site perhaps).  The same is true with all your navigation links.  They do not give an ideal idea of what the page is about.  They are usually only one or two words long for a start.

With internal linking in your body text, because you control the website, you have total control over what text goes into those links.  Let’s look at it from a search engines point of view.  They look at links, the text in the links and the relevance of the page the link points to.  They assume that the text in the link is representative of the page you are pointing to (otherwise it’s a pointless link).  If you have descriptive text in a link, it tells the search engine a bit more about the page than it could gain from simply crawling the page itself.  You are telling the search engines that the keyword(s) you use in your link are important for that page.  The search engines take that information, and when somebody else types those same keywords into the search engine, the search engine goes, “oh, I know, This page here is about that”, simply because it has been told it is by the link text.  Link text is a prime SEO factor.

That over simplifies it a bit, but it’s all you really need to know about it for now.

How to use internal links.  Like with all areas in SEO, moderation is king.  But I thought it was content that was king I hear you say.  Well yes, but Moderation in SEO efforts is vital.  Otherwise you are stuffing.

Here is a wonderful benefit of using internal link text.  You get the benefit of the words twice.  Say, for example you have a front (home) page on your site (which doubtless you do).  On that page you want to inform visitors about the whole sites’ contents.  To do this you write text that talks about all the things you have going on in the site.  Within that text will be keywords that you want to be found for, and those keywords will relate to other pages on the site.  Make a link out of them and point them to the other pages.

By creating a link in text you are saying to both users and search engines that they can find more information on the subject of the linked text by clicking on it.  The keyword is on the page and at the same time you are pointing out that another page on your site is also related to that keyword.  Sweet.

Blogging is a prime example of where this technique is used well.  I don’t do enough of it.  I sometimes write these posts just to remind myself of what I should be doing.  Take a look at copyblogger though.  Not only do they have a fair few internal links, but they also do a great job of teaching you about writing internet copy (that’s text to you and me).  They also write nice short posts in general, something I should learn from.

A word of caution.

I have seen this done to excess.  Try not to make your pages a horrendous looking sea of links.  Remember that guidelines say that you should have less than 100 links per page.  That includes all your navigation by the way.

Also, I should point out that including several links to the same page within your text is regarded by some (myself included) as a waste of time.  There is some evidence that if you use two different keywords to link to the same page, the first keyword will be given preference and the second will be ignored.  Somebody actually set up an experiment to test it and it would seem to be the case on Google.

Make sure the keywords you use in your link are relevant to both the page you link to and the surrounding text on the page you are linking from.  This is important.

I should have given you the short version of this post really:-

Create internal links with relevant keywords and don’t overdo it!  It will do you wonders.

The 80-20 Rule for onsite/offsite optimization. Yes the 20% is that important.

Following on from the last post on On-page SEO, it occurred to me that I had not mentioned the 80-20 rule.  That’s the trouble with SEO training, there is always something that gets left out!

The 80-20 Rule is quite simple.  Only 20% of your seo ranking will be based on your on-page optimisation.  I think I can hear a collective sigh and a head or two banging against desks.  I know, I know, you thought that if you followed the advice in the last post on On-page SEO that you would be celebrating much in terms of gained rankings.

Sorry, It doesn’t work like that.  That is not to say that On-page SEO is not important.  Indeed I consider it to be the very foundations of SEO.  I am appalled by SEO’s who say they will do all of a sites SEO off page.  20% is not to be sniffed at either, it’s a significant part of 100%, and, as you will have seen from the last post it is not very difficult either once you know what you are doing.

What we are left with though is a massive 80% of our SEO work still to do.  It is the off page SEO that sorts the men from the boys, the women from the girls and the hermaphrodites from the younger hermaphrodites.  Just keep an eye on this blog and we will get there!  I would also suggest you keep an eye on Hobo and grab the SEO e-book available there. I have not got around to writing an e-book yet.

The 80-20 Rule is a myth!

It is certainly not a hard and fast rule.  Nothing much is when it comes to SEO.  Talk to too many SEO’s and you will end up feeling confused.  There is much we disagree on.  As I started out I used to take the commonly held beliefs as fact and then experiment with some of the more “out there” claims made by some SEO’s.  Ultimately I found though that much of the content on the web was out of date.

There is tons and tons of out of date material out there on On-page SEO.  You could end up with half your page being taken up with useless or at least suspect meta tags alone.  These are largely tags that once held some value but no longer do.  Some of them were only relevant to some search engines.

Should you ignore all meta tags?  Not at all. But you can probably apply the 80-20 rule to them as well.  I often don’t bother with the keywords tag.  I certainly don’t bother with things like author tags.  I do however use the Google only “unavailable_after” tag which looks like this….

<meta name='GOOGLEBOT' content='unavailable_after: 12-Jan-2010 01:00:00 GMT' />

I use it where I have pages that are set to expire on certain dates.  It is fairly good at making sure people do not reach expired pages from a Google Search.  Does it have any SEO value?  I think not.  But it is good for visitors, and let us not forget that visitors are the whole reason for this SEO nonsense in the first place.

I’ve done it again, started out with a short post that starts rambling.  I’ll leave it at that for On-page SEO for now.  If you have any queries leave a comment, or contact me through Webshed.  Indeed, if you disagree with what I have written entirely I welcome your comments.  Debate is how we all learn and no SEO is EVER finished learning.

How vital is on page SEO to overall SEO efforts?

Keyword Stuffing

On page SEO is absolutely vital.  On its own, on page SEO will not get you far. Without it however, your overall SEO efforts will not get far.  This  is where a lot of people make lots of mistakes though.  There is not a lot that can go wrong with link building by comparison with on page SEO.

The prime mistake by people with their on page SEO is keyword stuffing.  Lets take a look at each element of a page and see how keyword stuffing can stuff you up.

Page Elements

Page title

• The page title is the words that appear at the top of your browser when you visit a page. It is a meta tag that goes <title>some text</title> and lives in the head section of your html page.
• Try to keep it to 40 characters or so and do not repeat keywords in it (stuffing).
• That includes variations like “Jobs Dublin”, “Jobs Cork” etc.
• Try to place your keywords at the beginning.  If you must include a company name then put it at the end.

Meta Description

• The Meta Description also lives in the head section of the html page.  It looks like.. <meta name=’description’ content=’blah blah blah’ />  It is usually the text that appears below your page title in search engine results.
• This should be aimed at users, not search engines.  While Google has not ruled out that it may use the content, it is given little importance in terms of gaining rank in the SERPS. Use it to sell your page to a viewer.
• What is certain is that if you stuff it with keywords you could well find yourself penalised, while simultaneously putting off any human visitors (and these are the ones you are after).

Meta Keywords

• Meta Keywords also live in the head section of your html.  These used to be used by search engines to determine what the author thought were relevant keywords for the page. Widespread abuse in the forms of keyword stuffing and non-relevant text mean that it is quite alright to leave this section out.  I still include it, but I make sure that I only include a handful of extremely relevant keywords that are actually in the visible text of the page.

H1 tag

• This is the title of the page, and will appear on the actual page. It is found in the body section of you html page.
• I often have the h1 tag exactly the same as my page title tag.  If this does not make sense to the page then I make sure it is at least extremely similar, containing the same keywords.
• The h1 tag is the most important piece of text in the visible page.  Choose your content wisely.
• There should only ever be one h1 tag per page.

h2-h6 tags

• The rest of the h (heading) tags are also important. The higher the number, the less important.  Treat them in the same way as your h1 tag.

Paragraph tags

• Everything on your page should be contained within tags.  The text in your paragraphs needs to be relevant to your title.  Remember you are dealing with dumb machines.  If you have a keyword in your h tag then make sure it is also in your paragraph tag below it.
• Write for humans.  Do not repeat keywords too much.

How Do I know if I am Keyword Stuffing Unintentionally?

A simple rule of thumb is that if it does not read well to a human, you are probably guilty of keyword stuffing.

To avoid unintentional keyword stuffing try to keep your keywords to about 5% of your page text.  If you go too far over then you will be penalised.  If you see a competitor above you who has a higher proportion of the same keyword it is likely that they are above you as a result of off page optimisation rather than on page optimisation.

Sometimes keyword stuffing works.  I have had pages usurped by pages from competitors with tons of keyword stuffing.  The good news is that it rarely lasts.  They climb and then they drop again as a general rule.  I want to teach you how to have more stable, long term results.

SEO should not be about cheating your way to the top, it should be about working within guidelines and optimising your efforts within those guidelines.  Anything else is risky.  You may get away with it for a while, maybe even a long time, but eventually your site will suffer.  It is easy to be temped by the ‘dark side’, but it is not a good idea for a business that depends on its website.  If you have a non-critical website, then feel free to practice all the dark arts of SEO – it will teach you a lot.  Just don’t host the site on the same server as any sites you care about.

The really bad keyword stuffing practices

• Hidden text. This is where you make the text the same colour as the background so that it is not visible to humans.  This text is often smaller than 8 pixels.  It is always full of keywords.  It works – until you get caught.
• Cloaking. Displaying different text to search engines than to human visitors.  Again this works – until you get caught.

If in doubt, don’t do it.

How far can I push it?

There is only one way to find out…. and that is to push it.  You can either slowly increase your keyword ratio on the page until you lose rank, or you can put in as many keywords as you can and slowly remove them until you gain rank.

The great thing about losing relevance as a result of keyword stuffing is that you can reverse it by fixing the problem.  It can be a slow process though, since it takes days for most sites to be crawled enough for changes to be reflected in the search rankings.

Final Advice on Keywords

• Beware of having keywords (particularly long tail – several worded – keywords) in close proximity.
• Make sure that your headings relate to the surrounding text.
• Remember that on page SEO is just the start.  You need to build links too.

I've heard of a fire engine, but what is a search engine?

The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Strictly speaking SEO means targeting just search engines.  It is concerned with getting your site as far up the Google, yahoo and Bing rankings for chosen keywords as possible.  Achieving that is done in many ways.

SEM on the other hand has several meanings in regular use.  Some think of it purely as PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns.  These are the ads you see on the right of the search results in search engines, and occasionally occupying the top slots.  I like to think of it as much more than that though.

When I think of SEM the word marketing takes priority.  I like to think of Search Engine Marketing as encompassing SEO but taking into account the user experience.

Let me expand on that.  A site may be extremely well optimised from an SEO perspective, ranking well in the major search engines, but that does not mean that the site is a good user experience.

It is a mistake to put SEO ahead of user experience.  I’ll give you an example. The following is SEO optimised text

Car washing by the car washing experts.  At Car Washing Ireland we wash cars all day every day.  When it comes to car washing we are the number one car washing company in Ireland.  If your car needs car washing then you have found the right site.  Contact us and one of our mobile car washing units will be dispatched to you and one of our car washing experts will have your car gleaming.  You will be so impressed with our car washing that you will return to car washing ireland again and again.

Actually, that is terrible SEO.  I have exaggerated it hugely.  The point is that SEO optimised text is not necessarily particularly readable text.  If the quality of English is high, then you use different words or phrases to describe the same thing.  This is at odds with SEO, where you want to repeat your key phrases.

The object is to achieve good legible text that a user will read, while retaining a keyword density that is reasonably high (though not much above 5% of total text).  It would be entirely better for both SEO and the user experience to write the above text with far fewer instances of “Car Washing”.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is all about S......elling!

SEM is more holistic.  It encompasses good SEO techniques for on page content (but not at the expense of the user experience).  It also covers Social Media as well as PPC advertising and even banner or button advertising.  Search Engine Marketing is about selling your site online.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of using the meta description purely to put in keywords.  Same goes for the page title.

In the case of the meta description it is fairly likely that google does not include that text in any meaningful way in its ranking algorithms.  I am not saying that you should not put keywords into the meta description or page title, but use them to better effect.

Better effect means using them to sell.  To stick with our car washing example, The title can be “Car washing Ireland”, the meta description could read “Get your car washed at home or at work.  We come to you.  Discount for online booking”.  No key words.  Just good descriptive text that helps sell the service.

The whole reason for this post was because I am writing about Social Media and somebody asked me “what has social media got to do with SEO training?”.

Well these days you can’t market your website online without at least paying lip service to social media.  And if you know your stuff (or get Social Media Training) then you can really make it work for you in a big way.  Look at what happened with the Susan Boyle clip on You Tube.  She became an overnight, international sensation, from a clip of an audition!  Wow.  That just does not happen with traditional media.

Why do companies invest thousands of euros in SEO training?  It’s all part of their marketing mix.  SEO is marketing.  Therefore, SEO is SEM and SEM includes SEO.  By the way.  I’ve just broken a rule there.  I’ve overused the phrases again (my site may pay for all this bad SEO!).  I was only playing with words, but be careful.  Remember we are dealing with dumb machines (no matter how good the algorithms are).  They do not see a bit of word play, but rather an attempt at keyword stuffing, which can hurt your ranking.

So, SEM is all about selling.  SEO is just about trying to get better ranking on Google et al.

One of these days I’ll learn to write short concise posts, but I hope that I’ve cleared up the difference between SEO and SEM somewhat.