SEO stands for search engine optimization. SEM stands for search engine marketing. You will see many website on the Internet that talk about these two terms – SEO and SEM. You will find that in many cases SEO (search engine optimization) is the more cost effective way of getting visitors to your website. SEO tries to game the natural search results of search engines, so that they bring up your website on the first page of the natural search results. SEM (search engine marketing) is the art of buying keywords from Yahoo search marketing or Goog;le adwords so that the website comes up higher on the sponsored listings of the search engines. The advantage of SEM is that you can pretty much bid for whatever relevant keyword and have your website be listed on the search engines. The cost for something like that can be very high. Some customers have been known to pay $25,000 per month for the luxury of being placed on the first page via SEM.

The advantage of SEO is the low cost. Whether you get one thousand visitors, or one million visitors the cost is still the same. The cost is whatever your paid your search engine optimization specialist to make that happen.