Search Engine Marketing, is a form of marketing through the Internet, which seeks to promote websites by increasing the visibility of the websites in the result pages of various search engines. As per the marketing professionals in the community of SEM, this grouping can further be distributed into various sub-categories. The popular components of web promotion include Search Engine Optimization, paid advertisement placement and paid inclusion of sponsor's advertisements.

Search Engine Optimization is a part of Search Engine Marketing. SEO in short is the process of directing traffic to the company's website. In other words, it is the procedure of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines through search results with targeted keywords.

It is researched, that higher the site is presented in the search results or the higher the website ranks, the more searchers will visit the enlisted site. This is a vital part of the entire online promotional campaigns. The rank of a website is based on getting more searchers to access a particular company's website. Search Engine Optimization targets different kinds of search including image search, local search and industry?specific vertical search engines.

SEO is based on the analysis of the statistics of the searchers. Thus, SEO works towards 'how search algorithms work' and 'what people search for'. A SEO work list includes a site's coding, presentation, and structure as well as bug fixing that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site.

Some other efforts in the list of Search Engine marketing include putting in noticeable labor by adding unique content to a site. This ensures that content is easily indexed by search engine robots making the site more appealing to users.

Search Engine marketing also works on another type of technique known as 'Black Hat' Search Engine Optimization or 'spamdexing'. More techniques such as 'link farms' and 'keyword stuffing' are also used to facilitate the search. This helps the website to put out and sell what they actually wanting to sell in the market.

The professionals who work to get the best marketing strategy for the various websites use the term ?Search Engine Optimizers? to define themselves. They usually work on hire basis on the requirements of the clients. A few companies are there, mostly big, who keep in-house Search Engine Optimizers. A few of the companies may offer Search Engine Optimizer, globally, as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign.

Effective Search Engine Optimizers may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, as well as incorporating other high level languages like PHP and AJAX.

Not only a good SEO team can optimize the content of the site, they can also add that little extra to boost the 'look-n-feel' of the site. Search Engine Marketing and optimizer, though two different terms, still are inter-related to the entire concept of marketing a brand online.