Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing are not only different in their names but also otherwise too. Many people have grown this misconception in their mind about them being one and the same thing. It is to be noted that they may have certain similarities but they work on different basis. In general opinion, SEM is a much larger term than SEO or we can say that the former comprises of the later. Search Engine Marketing basically involves the goal of attracting more and more traffic to the website by promoting it on different platforms. This in turn will increase the profits generated by your website. With reference to the above stated definition, we can include SEO as a subset of SEM.

The work area of optimization is also to provide traffic to the website and optimize it for the search engine as well as the user. However, marketing consists of certain attributes, which are out of the scope of optimization like paid inclusions, traditional ads, and pay per click advertisement. The practice of paid inclusion is often adopted by those websites who change their content very frequently and want to test that how this will affect their page rankings. In the process of paid inclusion, the given website gets directly included in the database of search engine rather than setting up the website and then waiting for the crawlers to index it.

There are two other methods also, which are preferred widely and they are traditional advertisements and PPC ads. In traditional advertisements, an ad is placed on the pages of search engines depending on the keyword searched. In this system, the advertiser gets charged, even if it the advertisement is not targeting any traffic to the website. PPC on the other hand is pretty simple and easy to use. You are the sole authority to decide how, where and when should your advertisements show up. The advertiser will be charged on the basis of the number of targets diverted towards the website.

However, if all of the above is compared to SEO services, they are comparatively more expensive. They require less time to promote any website, whereas, optimization will take 3-4 months for boosting up the page rankings. It is beneficial for the startups or mid-sized firms, which are not willing to spend a large amount of money into marketing. They would prefer this service, as it is cheap and affordable for most of the small companies. Even the big giants of the industry still carry on with their SEO work along with other marketing techniques and strategies.

It is entirely the choice of a business enterprise to select whichever service they wish to adopt for enhancing the growth of their organization.