Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wmeredith | Hacker News Reader

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That's not SEO (Search Engine Optimization). That's SEM (Search Engine Marketing) aka link-building/trolling/link-baiting/viral marketing... whatever you want to call it, it's about putting compelling content on your site that gets passed along on its own merits attracting links.

SEO is done on-site and is a process of organizing your information architecture so it is search-engine-friendly, and then creating content that is relevant to your target market. That way you can get indexed for the terms you want, so that you appear on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) exposing you to your target market at their time of need.

Once that's done, SEM begins which is about attracting off site links that get you ranked high on those SERPs so you get traffic. (There's another side of SEM that's about PPC.)

SEO and SEM go hand-in-hand, but they are still two different things. (Not being snarky, just pointing something out. I'm an online marketer and client education is the biggest challenge of my field.)

That's a semantic quibble which I don't think adds a ton to the conversation. Besides that, it might just be WRONG. Just about every SEO professional I know would include copywriting, linkbait AND markup under the umbrella of SEO.

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_marketing )

"Search engine marketing, or SEM, is a form of Internet marketing that seeks to promote websites by increasing their visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.[1]. The industry peak body Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), also includes search engine optimization (SEO) within its reporting, but SEO is a separate discipline with most sources, including the New York Times defining SEM as 'the practice of buying paid search listings'.[2][3]"

http://is.gd/16x87 (GoogleFight! ;-) )

http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engi... (intro to SEO article which talks about linkbait).

Note: Not being snarky. I've been an online marketer and spoken on SEO. I think client education is important-- but we should focus on what's important and not the subtleties of acronyms.

My clients are usually more apt to talk about subtleties of acronyms than I. I'm glad you fought back a little though, you have a great point. I'd prefer to take the term SEO out back and have it shot, personally. I'm a bigger fan of findability, a la http://www.alistapart.com/articles/findabilityorphan/

Interesting distinctions. I guess I misunderstood the term SEO when I first heard it. If optimization refers to rearranging your content so that search engines can parse it more easily, then I can see where you're coming from. I thought it referred only to the end result, i.e. improving your site's rank. Thanks for the correction.

You're right in your definition. SEO (search engine friendly design, link building, etc.) is a subset of SEM. SEO is about improving your organic (non-paid) search results. SEM generally refers to a combination of SEO and PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, and other online marketing methods.

That said, I think things like the 37 signals post are too easily classified as SEO when it's really just publicity seeking with no real intent on improving the sites rankings.

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