There are many things that your site designer can do to help your site be as optimized as possible. But AT LEAST 50% of your search engine optimization is up to you, I think it’s more like 75%. Here are some of the basic things we do to make sure your site is optimized:
- build sites in DIVs with CSS
- include a keyword relevant, reasonable title for each page
- include text links to all main pages of the site
- include a site map
- place ALT tags on all images
You don’t have to understand what the heck we just said.  There are many more that we do but won’t go into here. Those are just some of the basics.

Honestly, that paragraph is far less important than this one. Here are some of the things that YOU can do to improve your SEO that will outweigh the things mentioned above:
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY
- Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, whatever Social Network you use – post updates there about your site and provide links
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY
- Ask friends with sites, or companies that provide complimentary but not competing services to link to you
- UPDATE YOUR SITE FREQUENTLY

All of this stuff is explained further in the Blog Post – Committing to Your Website, take a look at it.

Both are valuable and both are part of your web presence. In this series we will define what they are, how they can help, and how to utilize them.

Search Engine Optimization is defined as all the things you can do on your site, and for your site to make it more appealing and indexable by Search engines (google, yahoo, bing, etc.). For our purposes we will use Google in referencing search engines, since it is by far the most prominent and widely used (boasting over 2-3 billion searches a day)

Search Engine Marketing traffic that you pay for and control directly. This is essentially purchasing a link to your site, and then controlling exactly who sees it. You can specify your purchased ad to appear for people who search for something specific. For example, if you sell shelves, you can specify that your ad will appear on googles paid listing when people type in “cabinet shelves chattanooga” or “closet shelves tennessee”.

Below are graphics depicting paid listings and regular or “organic” listings.

Some people say that SEO encompasses SEM and some will argue the opposite. They are both valuable to your overall web presence though.