M-Power Solutions offer specialised consulting expertise in Business Performance Management (BPM). Their services cover BPM from a process and technology perspective.
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Both the XHTML and CSS validate with the W3C standards.
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I have had many ask me what the difference between Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is, so I thought I might throw a couple of definitions out there.
I am going to start with SEO, as it is a part of SEM. SEO is the act of optimising the HTML and other content of your website for relevant, targeted key phrases in order to attain higher natural listings than competing websites. SEO provides a cheaper long term solution for increased qualified traffic and generates customer inquiries that ultimately convert to sales.
Now SEM is broader than SEO. It includes SEO and other areas to improve a sites visibility in search engine results pages, like paid listings and paid inclusions.
You can think of SEM as more expensive and quite possibly more targeted, while SEO is free (not counting your time of course) and its purpose is to obtain better free search listings.
Personally, I would start with SEO and then move onto SEM.
Well I guess I should start at the beginning, for those of you who are starting out and want to learn exactly what SEO really is. To begin with, SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimisation, and what better place to obtain the perfect meaning for SEO other than Wikipedia 
: Search engine optimisation is a set of methods aimed at improving the ranking of a website in search engine listings.
So the main aim in SEO is to get your website to the top or as high as possible to the top of search engine listings. There are ethical and unethical methods of achieving this, but I believe in only using ethical ways and will focus on these only. Many search engines will penalise domains for “cheating”.
I will try my hardest to blog on SEO or tips on the topic, whether it be on site architecture, page content, or finding the suitable directories. My plan is to share as much as I can with you and who knows, maybe I can learn from you too!
Footnote: In some countries, for example the United States, the spelling is Search Engine Optimization. Google’s definition of SEO is an abbreviation for “search engine optimizer”.
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What is white hat and black hat SEO and where do we draw the line between them? In short, white hat is used to describe techniques that are with in the guidelines of search engines and black hat (also known as spamdexing) those that use all the unethical ways to achieve top ranks (usually short-lived).
Matt’s description: “White hat SEOs adhere to the letter of the search engine guidelines (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and black hat SEOs will use any method they can to promote their site while trying to avoid getting banned. Gray hats are somewhere in between these two extremes.” – Matt Cutts
Well, Matt has actually answered both questions. There are a couple of gray areas between these two forms of SEO and therefore there isn’t a definite border between the two.
It is easy to describe what white hat SEO, but I thought that it would be of help for some of you if I listed black hat activities. Not that I want you to adopt them for yourself, of course, but that you should consider steering clear from them. Such actions could possibly get your site banded from some search engines. I am not going to explain all the tricks in the black book as there are too many.
Some others that I have not explained are URL redirects, cloaking, blog spamming, spam blogs (splogs), referrer log spamming, doorway pages, link farms and many more…
WOW, there seems to be more black hat tactics than ethical SEO methods. My advice to you is this: stick to the search engine’s guidelines, don’t tarnish you name with shifty SEO tricks and you will do just fine. What you should be aiming to accomplish is a site with quality content or something helpful that people will enjoy and recommend to friends. Keep it real!