Search engine optimization has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. In the strictest sense, SEO is about the on-page and off-page design strategies you can use to improve your search engine ranking. This usually means tweaking your web site, using design elements and content. And in most cases, it also means spending no money at all.
SEM, or Search Engine Marketing, is not just SEO. More accurately, SEM includes PPC or pay-per-click advertising. Search engine marketing is about doing whatever you need to do to ensure that your web site ranks as high as possible in search engine results. This means not only that you make the needed changes to your website design, but that you also employ other tactics, like using a paid advertising program or investing in content strategies.
The ultimate goal of SEM is to bring more people to your website. And you can do that by improving your search engines results. You can also do that by taking advantage of a growing phenomenon on the Web, social media. Social media is a viral form of sharing information on the Web. You might think of it as a more sophisticated method of sharing your favorites or information that you think will interest other people. And using social media to improve the traffic to your web site is called Social Media Marketing, or SMM.
All these marketing efforts have one thing in common : reaching your target audience. And today anyone who is not an SEO purist places all these marketing methods under the SEM umbrella. All of them are methods for optimizing your website for the audience that you are trying to reach. And as social media grow in popularity, they are going to be affected by and included in search engine results as well.
Every now and then, you need to step away from the crowd and stop doing what everyone else is doing. In SEO, stepping out alone is usually rewarded with better traffic results. Everyone is doing the same thing. And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't. What it means is that you should do the same thing in a different way. And that's where the Search Engine Optimization Bible comes in.
Throughout the pages inside this book will shown you the best practices for search engine optimization and provide insight into the theory behind the strategies that you'll learn. These strategies are tested. They work. For thousands of web sites. Use them to build on. Follow the best practices of search engine optimization but do it creatively. Try something different. That's how blogs became such a huge phenomenon. It's how social bookmarking and social communities caught on. Someone looked at marketing in a different way and came up with a new angle.
So, use the information that you'll find inside this book to improve your search engine ranking. Use it to improve the traffic to your web site. But most importantly, use it to reach highly targeted customers who will take the actions you desire them to take on your web site. That customer audience is always first. Remember this as you market, keep the audience as your focus, and your efforts will be successful.
