Glossary of Terms
Search Engine Optimisation
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to search engine marketing (SEM) which deals with paid inclusion.”
Search Engine Marketing
“Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.”
As you can see from the above definition, SEM is much more than just “Paid Search”, something many sites fail to recognise. We therefore find that it is less confusing if we mostly talk of Paid versus Non-Paid when we are talking about specific campaigns and only use SEM when we refer to a ‘blended approach’ of both paid and non-paid in the exclusive context of search engines.