SEO, SEM- What's the Difference?

What is difference between SEO and SEM?

 

SEO refers to improving your site and it's backlinks so that it appears in a better position in organic/unpaid search listings.

SEM refers to using paid search programmes, such as adwords

 

According to wikipedia:

SEO:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing ("SEM") which may deal with paid inclusion.

SEM:

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 search engine optimization, paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion

 

SEO is the process of promoting our site into the search engine by using on page and off page techniques.
SEM is the process of marketing our site into social media site such as twitter and facebook.

 

I think SEM including SEO,
SEO just a part of SEM

 

Hello Dear
I agree with u Jeff Collision and enous...

 

SEM is the whole enchilada, and seo is merely a piece of it ;p.

I also agree with enous

 

SEM is paid & inorganic marketing technique and seo is orgaic methods. SEO is cheaper than SEM.

 

SEO= Search Engien Optimization, it's comes all link building method off page and on page, where as SEM= Social Media Optimization, only Marketing Product Services through Social media site like Twitter, Facebook, digg, myspace etc

 

seo + smo = sem

 

Others have stated the difference but we must also realize their similarities. Now with G Caffeine we see SEO and SEM beginning to merge as social media results become interwined with search engine results. People are even using FB as a SE, albeit a small %. Be sure to optimize all your social profiles, and your tweets/status updates.