What is the difference between SEO and SEM.

As a digital marketer student, I usually use these two terms SEO and SEM interchangeably. However, I found my self using them wrong. In fact, these two terms are not the same. There is a difference between them in terms of optimizing your website.

Search engaging optimization(SEO) is defined as the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.(1) SEO includes two different activities which are on-page optimization such as keywords in a website's title, HTML tags, Alt attribution and off-page optimization such as social sharing tools and bookmarking tools.

 Search engaging marketing (SEM) is defined as a form of Internet marketing that involved the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPS) through optimization and advertising(2).

If you look deeply at these two definitions, you will find the clue that SEM is comprised of SEO tactics and other search marketing tactics such as pay per click (ppc) and advertisements as well. As I mentioned above that SEM is to promote a website by increasing its visibility in search engine results, so that means to increase your website visibility on the search results, you need to use SEO first and then you use SEM to promote your website through paid search marketing.

Read more on SEO and SEM at https://blog.hubspot.com/insiders/seo-sem-faqs