Search engine optimization, or SEO, and Search Engine Marketing, or SEM, have become popular technologies to market a business online. Since many consumers are buying products online instead of going to stores, businesses can reach those customers through these techniques. Search engine optimization uses strategies that help search engines more easily find a website or web page. The goal is to move as close to the top of the search engine results as possible when a customer is searching for specific products or services. Search engine marketing is the overall marketing of a website, which can include SEO of the website as well as other marketing methods. SEM often includes paid advertising, whereas SEO makes a website come up naturally in search results.
Search engine optimization utilizes numerous techniques to improve the ranking of a website. One of the main focuses is on keywords. Keywords and key phrases are used in strategic places and in specific frequencies throughout an article so that the article will match the keywords or key phrases someone is searching for. A business can use tools such as Google Adwords to find specific keywords that are the most popular and most likely to improve search engine rankings. Another technique is to use links coming from other sites to your own site, which improves ranking.
SEO can also include the layout of the website, videos and images, content management systems, and other aspects that make the website move up in search engine rankings.
Search engine marketing often uses paid techniques, as well as SEO. These include pay-per-click and other paid advertisements, although it also utilizes free techniques like social media marketing.
Although search engine optimization and social engine marketing have become a part of common language more recently, they have been around since the mid 1990s. At that time, social engine optimization was far more primitive and did not involve nearly as many strategies, such as keywords and videos. The Multimedia Marketing Group is given credit to first using the term “search engine optimization” in 1997, and Danny Sullivan later coined the term “search engine marketing” in 2001 as an all-encompassing phrase for the wide range of tactics involved. In the beginning, meta tags, or keywords used to index a web page, were a large part of search engine optimization; this has changed, however, as they were misused by website owners to gain more views. Website owners misused additional techniques as well, such as keyword density and linking. Because of this, search engines now determine rankings through more complicated methods, incorporating numerous SEO techniques and aspects of web pages, and some of the methods are kept secret. This way, it is not as easy for website owners to take advantage of the system. Currently, social media platforms, including blogs, Facebook, and Twitter, play a large role in search engine rankings, which has resulted in quickly-changing search results.
The yearly budget for these techniques depends on the size and dynamics of the business. However, a survey by Goldstein Group Communications and Hearst Business Media found that businesses planned to spend 14 percent of their marketing budgets on search engine marketing, including search engine optimization, in 2011. Altogether, North American businesses spent a total of $14.6 billion on search engine marketing in 2009; to put that into perspective, in 2006, the amount spent was $9.4 billion, and it is expected to be at $18.6 billion in 2011, according to estimates by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, or SEMPO.
Research by PowerReviews Inc. and the E-Tailing Group found that half of consumers in the 2010 study research half of their shopping online and 57 percent start searching for products on the internet through search engines. This is where SEM and SEO come in. When a customer is searching for the products or services your business offers, search engine optimization and search engine marketing tactics help them find you.
With the rise of internet marketing and SEO based methods for their promotion, online businesses always strive for newer methods of advertising. PPC or Pay Per Click Advertising is making waves, owing to its multifarious benefits. In PPC, ads are placed carefully on search engines ad relevant websites or blog properties with high Page Rank, and advertisers are charged on the basis of the number of clicks by the visitors, based on the estimated cost per click. 
SEO methods take some time to produce the desired results, owing to the time required in creating a natural linking pattern through careful optimization of content and backlinks from high PR pages. However, in the haste to bring themselves on the first few pages of the major search engine pages and get their web pages indexed more quickly, several companies have now begun to indulge in what are known as Black Hat SEO Techniques, which in other words are practices used in order to get search rankings in an unethical manner by violating search engine rules or by publishing content in a manner so as to mislead the search engine spiders. Black Hat SEO Techniques are frowned upon by search engines, as these techniques are unethical and also create a poor user experience, and hence should be avoided by online companies, as these are short sighted approaches and there is no long term gain possible through them.
