SEO Marketing Services | Internet Marketing Specialist

We will pronounce the winner shortly, first have a quick look at the competitors (search engine optimization, search engine marketing and internet marketing) their techniques, strengths, limitations and lastly … why do we need a winner in the first place?

Because all three of them are inter-related and the techniques used are somewhat similar, people often confuse one with another. Question is, if the nature and techniques are almost the same, why do we have three different titles? Do we (SEO professionals) use them to impress our clients? Is this just an attempt to make a mountain out of molehill? Sales pitch like “We are XYZ Company specializing in Search engine optimization, Search engine marketing, Internet marketing and Contextual advertising”, whereas all they have in their arsenal is … “the all-almighty free directory submission”. Although, such companies are not really hard to find but SEO, SEM and Internet Marketing are indeed three different entities. Let’s see how …

SEO:

This is the most basic and a must for all websites. A site not optimized for the search engines is a site nowhere to be found. For small businesses, not optimizing for search engine is a cyber-sin, a negligence that they will never be absolved of. Most of the techniques used (be it on-page optimization or off-page optimization) are of Do-it-yourself nature and no real costs are attached (because it takes lots of time and SEO is not something to be compromised, you have the choice of engaging the experts). The only catch is that you are in dark most of the time, search engines cannot unveil their algorithms, and successful campaigners keep mum about their trade secrets, plus you have no assurance that the method that works really well for ‘Site A’ is going to work for ‘Site B’.

SEM:

You optimize websites to place them higher in SERP’s … but is that the only way to attract traffic from search engines? Obviously not, Search engine marketing goes one step ahead. As I’ve earlier mentioned, most of the techniques used in SEO have no costs attached (unless you hire someone to do the SEO), but majority of commercial websites, which depend on their online traffic for survival can’t leave everything on search engine optimization, in addition to SEO they make use of search engines through other mediums as well e.g. paid inclusion/placement in search results or cost-per-click/impression advertisements at search engine networks (as in Google AdSense). Unlike SEO, we don’t have any on-page SEM or black-hat SEM techniques.

Internet Marketing:

Internet marketing is a more planned, more comprehensive and as a result more effective approach than SEO or SEM. Internet marketers don’t rely solely on search engines; they start from taking into consideration the business objectives and the budget, analyze their targeted traffic, evaluate all the available options and try to avail as many as possible including SEO, SEM, e-mail marketing, press release distribution, corporate blogs and other Web 2.0 channels.

So, the winner?

Actually, there’s no clear winner among these three. While Internet marketing is the more composite and the most rewarding one, it has some cons like considerable research, expertise and expenses are required, on the other hand SEO is much easier and inexpensive but it doesn’t guarantee to yield the desired results. At the end of the day, you should pick the one that suits your goals and objectives. Hence, the winner is the one (and will be decided by you on a project to project basis) that will be able to meet your targets while using the minimum of resources.