The often missed, but essential practices of SEM and SEO

Search Engine Marketing and Optimization. If you are reading this article you most likely know the basics of what the two mean, but for those who do not or need a refresher…here it goes:

Search Engine Marketing - Typical involves advertising on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and various other search engines. Programs like Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Search Marketing, and more are typically used in conjunction with start up websites and even established ones :) .

Search Engine Optimization -Optimization is completely different from Search Marketing in that Optimization is all about your website as a whole. Some things to keep in mind are: Does your website utilize xhtml and css standards? Does your website use Alternate text (e.g. ) ? Are your links relevant to information on your page? These are just a few things to take into consideration when building or maintaining SERP’s (Search Engine Ranking Pages).

To start off, I will discuss the often common missed practices for Search Engine Marketing:

* Time of year - People seem to think that time of year does not matter. By far the worst time to spend most of your money on SEM is towards the end of the year (Christmas, Hanukkah, etc). Some people need to face reality, people are not at their computer’s during this time especially or better yet looking online for your services. Instead, they are spending time with their families, which is a given .

* Too much money spent on advertising - Companies go around spending hundreds of dollars a month on advertising when all their advertising efforts are useless, their marketing steps should begin with their initial design.

* Ads being displayed annoying - How many times have you been to a website and boom an annoying sound starts playing in the background with no on/off switch? How often are you reading a article on a website and the ads get in the way of the text you are reading? How would you feel if your reading was interrupt by someone’s stupid ad being displayed? These are just a few complaints that make a potential reader leave and go somewhere else.

Some common missed practices of Search Engine Optimization include:
* Text is not readable by Search Engines- Numerous businesses today still design their site primarily in Photoshop. While, this might look great from an aesthetic standpoint, from an optimization standpoint its terrible. Search engines cannot understand and/or read text within images or in flash.

* Link farming and invalid links - Newbies to website optimization often look toward link farm agencies to get them inbound and outbound links to their websites to increase their SERP (Search Engine Ranking pages), or the pages that link to a particular website. If search engine optimization were so easy, people would not be getting paid over $100/hour for search engine optimization. However, you do get one thing out of link farming and do you know what that is? Being banned from search engines, that in theory will make you money for free. * Out of date technologies - What is the use of making a website if your not using up to date technologies? You wouldn’t want to create a business and not be able to represent it correctly online? So what’s the point? If your website is a 1990 website built in old-standards of html without anything else why should your potential client trust you or better yet trust your services. They won’t and they shouldn’t, creating a successful isn’t just about creating a website and your done; it’s doing it the right way that counts.

Conclusion - So you’ve seen the benefits of not only building a website from a design standpoint (SEO) correctly, but also how not to burn your business on too much paid advertising like Google Adsense where the ROI isn’t worth what some people spend. If you get anything out of this article, understand that especially for start up businesses spending hundreds of dollars per month just for a handful of clicks is not worth it in the long run, the ROI is not worth it. Remember this before you go to spend hundreds per month on a little three line text ad.

About the Author
Joseph Dickinson, a New Jersey based Web Developer who created JDFreelance.com and the JDFreelance Blog. Currently, I’m a college student studying Computer Information Systems at Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania. I work for the U.S. Navy in Philadelphia, PA as a database adminstrator full-time during the summers working with PHP, mySQL backend databases, XHtml, and Css. I love blogging, enjoy your post my blog!

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