You're right. After all, neither has to do with increasing traffic to your website. None of the two is on the Internet, and none of them are beneficial to marketing your products. Just kidding. Read before you post.
Right just the same that advertising your website in your local newspaper is the same as SEM because the idea is to drive traffic... They are the same that the point is to drive traffic from the search engines - that's about it. In order to make a semi-successful SEM campaign you have to know how to use the internet and click a few buttons while trying to make a semi educated choice on what keywords to use based upon a given Adwords tool and if your lucky a little bit about Quality Scores. In order to be good at SEO you have to understand how code works, internal linking structure, external link structure, the difference between Meta Elements, what works - what doesn't, Dynamic URLs vs. Static etc... There are many differences between the two. I love when businesses say they know SEO when they are running an Adwords campaign that their 13 year setup for them.
I get that you're trying to make a statement here and I agree that a lot of people think they're SEO masters just because they spent a few bucks on an Adwords campaign. However, the similarity between SEO and SEM is that both are trying to achieve the same exact thing: more traffic.
Good question. I used to use the two terms interchangeably, but I've come to realize they're two different ideas altogether. SEO = Optimizing your page for search engines. This includes things like using - header tags in good places and other sane unses of valid x/HTML (no frames) - making sure your information is accessible for the search engine (not locked in an image, flash, or Java) - making sure the spider has a way to get to all the pages on your site (you need to link to them or specify them via googles sitemap tool) - having useful and relevant filenames/paths and titles for web pages SEO = Marketing to those who use search engines (or: get your page noticed by those who search, which means getting higher up on the SERP). When someone buys links to get a higher PR (which is against googles TOS), that's SEM. Using advertisements on the search pages is also SEM. It's a big area.
Do you kids ever contribute anything helpful? The question has already been answered and 30 more people have said the same exact thing. The thread is finished. Stop trying to fiend for a higher post count.
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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 while SEO is the subset of SEM which improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines
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Search engine marketing (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. While search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" search results.