by Karina Beattiger 3.April 2008 14:47
SEO: Search Engine Optimization. SEM: Search Engine Marketing. The difference? Letters. And theory. And, in the end, results.
When I first started here, WD Weems made it his goal in life -- at least short-term -- to make sure I knew exactly how a website should be laid out. Bearing in mind that I came from a purely tabular point of view, it was as if a whole new world had opened up for me. Instead of designing an image purely around how it looked, I started looking at how it was being read. Who and what would be reading it. How and what would be read. Nowadays, I sincerely enjoy clicking on View > Page Style > No Style (Firefox, anyway) and looking at my pretty text, lined up nice and neat for Search Engines to sniff out and read. Pretty as a, well, textbook. You can see what I mean by going to Mindfly.com and following the aforementioned directions.
That's called SEO -- Search Engine Optimization -- and that's the start of SEM, which embraces the above and more.
Search Engine Marketing is only a small portion about what the HTML of your site looks like. Oh, sure, it needs to meet all the usual XHTML standards, it needs to be clearly laid out so that the search engine spider doesn't have to skip over whole blocks of what we see as text because we can read words on an image (note: it can't, so that's wasted space, as far as it cares), but there's more to it than that. It's also about how you label things, where the text is in relation to itself (holy positionary selectors, Batman!), how and where keywords are spaced and seeded throughout the content, and even as far as what keywords you're selecting, why, and to what purpose.
Are you thoroughly confused yet?
I am no expert, understand, but I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject. Between myself and Content Mistress Theresa, we're bound to find that happy medium between what goes into the background -- that's me! -- and what's going into the foreground -- that's her! We're only about halfway through our designated reading, but I'll tell you what: there's an art to this thing. A science. An art and a science. With some chutzpah thrown in for kicks.
For example, we all know (or should) that the <title> tag is one of the most important tags when it comes to search engine sniffery. That's generally one of the first places it looks, and placing your keywords into it will score you a big one for the team. <H1> and <h2> tags are also important. Once upon a time, the <meta> tags were terribly important, but now only Yahoo! worries about the keyword one. Like WebCEO says in its informational run-down:
Its initial purpose was to give the search engine robots an idea of
what the page is about to help with rankings. Unfortunately, as soon as
this became evident, so many spammers started abusing it that spiders
now have discounted the importance of this tag by at least half of its
original ranking value. Most experts tend to think this tag has lower
weight than the META description tag. But since the Yahoo! family of
search engines still considers the keyword META tag when determining
relevancy, it remains important in search engine optimization. Google,
however, only considers the description META tag, so the keyword META
tag holds no importance at all when optimizing for them.
That said, did you also know that a spider only usually reads about 100Kb of a single page before throwing its legs up and giving a toss? For sites where there isn't too much information beyond what is expected -- i.e. every author site out there or hobby sites of various kinds -- this isn't too much of a problem. Where you run into the issue is when a single page is over 100Kb in size. This means that your keyword placement is vewy, vewy impowtant. Higher up, ideally, closer to the top. But it also means that if you're the type of person to put in 33 lines of META keywords, you might be shooting yourself in the footer. Not only are spiders programmed to avoid like the plague anything that looks like spam, you'll get dinged for "spamming" -- even if you aren't! -- and some of your important stuff will get cut-out.
... Are you really, really confused yet? I am! But it's fun. In that strange sort of quadratic equation way.