“Search engine optimization and search engine marketing are crucial in growing your business. Spending money building a website is a waste if no one visits it.”
Search engine marketing and search engine optimization often leave our readers confused. Let’s be honest both SEO and SEM terms are used interchangeably without a clear understanding how they are related to each other. Both processes are used to increase visibility in search engines but it is important to know what is the main difference between them.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of increasing website visitors by ensuring high ranking of the website in search engine results.
Search engine marketing (SEM) is a type of internet marketing that involves website promotion by maximizing its visibility in SERPs (search engine result pages) through PPC advertising and optimization.
Before differentiating these terms, you should get a clear idea about how search engines work. Now the question arises:
What is a search engine?
Search engine refers to an online tool that search results from its huge database (programs, images, web pages etc.) based on keywords submitted by the users. For Example Google seeks to provide the most appropriate and relevant result for its users queries.
How Search Engines Work?
Search Engines like Google use a complex algorithm that search out several web pages containing the specific keyword users used to search. Different factors play a significant role in assigning rank to each page i.e. how many times a specific keyword is present on a page.
Basically, Google can scan the index of hundreds and billions of pages within a few seconds to find out a set of results that provide users accurate answers to their queries. Now the question is how the best result is determined by Google.
Even though the working of Google’s algorithm is not public and is based upon patents and filed statements, but here are some points upon which your website and the web page is ranked. And, obviously, a website providing the best result will achieve a higher ranking.
● Relevant Keyword
Google only shows content relevant to the entered keywords. For instance, if you are looking for clothes, you don’t want to search shoes or jewelry pages. So, Google first finds relevant content then analyzes how close the search is to your unique keyword.
But how Google will show accurate results from millions of websites. And how these web pages are ranked on SERPs based on some other factors.
● Authority of Website
Authority of a website determines the accuracy and reliability of the content. Google can estimate the authority of the web pages and websites by looking at the number of links. If a web page gets more links by back-linking, it will be more authoritative and will come in a higher rank than others.
● High-Quality content
Google’s foremost priority is to choose useful and high-quality content. So, you will not be able to get your desired ranking if your content is not useful. The useful content is determined by the organized pattern and clarity of content.