SEO, SEA, SMO, SEM. You should see these different acronyms appear regularly on the internet today. If you are a neophyte, their senses are probably unknown to you. If you are used to the web, you certainly know a little more, but there may still be some hesitation. It must be said that many people always mix them up and disseminate information that is not always very accurate. We are here today to put an end to this and to understand once and for all the relationships that these different terms have.
What is SEO?
The SEO (Search Engine Optimization – Optimization for Search Engines) is nothing other than SEO on the internet called “natural.” That is to say, all the techniques which aim at improving the positioning of a website in a search engine such as Google for example. SEO focuses on three pillars: technique, content and popularity. It is necessary to act on these 3 pillars in order to improve the visibility of a site on the internet. The technique concerns everything related to the performance of a site. The content concerns the heart of the site: its texts, images and videos.
This is the material of the site and what is directly offered to Internet users. Good content is exhaustive, unique and original. Finally, popularity concerns the references made by third-party websites to another website. To illustrate, good content will probably be taken up on other websites and shared. This is a strong indicator of popularity and therefore of quality for a search engine. A site getting lots of relevant inbound links will be seen as a quality site.
The SEA (for Search Engine Advertising – Advertising on Search Engines) defines what is commonly called SEO “paying”. It actually concerns advertising disseminated on a search engine. Google is the best example with its famous advertising agency Google Ads. You will indeed notice that for certain requests, so-called sponsored results (“ads”) appear on the search engine. These are purchased advertising slots. In the case of Google Ads, we buy for example keywords. If our bid is high enough, our ad will appear when a user searches specifically for the keywords in question.
What is SMO?
The SMO (for Social Media Optimization) includes all activities aimed at developing the visibility of a business through social media. The weight of these is not always obvious to understand when focusing on search engines. Indeed, if Youtube and Google+ (the two babies of Google) have a certain weight, that of other social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Dailymotion is more relative. Youtube and Google+ are essential today in a “search” strategy. It is indeed common to see YouTube videos go up in search results (and Youtube videos go up much more than Dailymotion or Vimeo videos for example) and it should not be forgotten that Youtube is itself the second search engine to the world in terms of volume of research. The same goes for Google+ which, in addition to personalizing the SERPs according to the connected user profile, offers many options linked to visibility on the results pages.
The weight of other social media is more relative (always in terms of the search strategy that we cover in this article). The profiles go back well from time to time, but it is essentially by their power of communication, federation and loyalty that they are very widely distinguished.
What is SEM in the end?
The SEM (for Search Engine Marketing – Marketing on Search Engines) is an umbrella term taking into account all the techniques to improve the visibility of an entity (site, company, person) on search engines. Therefore, SEM is a grouping of marketing techniques.
If you observe the first 3 points of this article, you will notice an obvious complementarity between the 3 techniques (SEO, SEA and SMO). Thus, all the techniques that we have observed previously simply compose what is called SEM.
About the author
DMTwebhosting.com’s Editorial Team prides itself on bringing you the latest web hosting news and the best web hosting articles!
You could also link to the news and articles sections: