SEO, SEM, or social media? What is recommended?

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SEO, SEM, or social media? What is recommended?
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• There are many recommendations on how web
  designers, developers and marketers should market
  their sites online. Some people recommend SEO
  while some say social media is the best place to
  start. Is there a right answer? Could it be all
  three? This article will discuss the pros and
  cons of each option but keep in mind that this
  represents my own opinion (and that of my clients
  for the past few months.)

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• The SEO industry has changed dramatically over
  the last several years. I'll discuss some of
  those changes a little later in this post, but
  first let's discuss some basics about search
  engines and what they do. Search engine
  optimization is a way of improving your website's
  ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages)
  when someone types in a related word. The more
  optimized your website is, the higher it will
  appear on search results. Keywords are very
  important in this process because they tell
  Google what your site is about. The keywords you
  choose should be relevant to the content of your
  page and information that people are looking for
  when they type in specific phrases into their
  browsers or search engines.

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• There are also two other types of strategies SEO
  marketers may adopt off-site and on-page SEO.
  Off-page SEO includes link building. When
  websites link to each other, Google sees that as
  social proof of your site's influence, which in
  turn improves page rank. However many people are
  suspicious of these practices because they
  believe some companies engage in unethical ways
  to inflate their rankings . On the other hand,
  on-page SEO means getting higher placement
  through factors like keywords without artificial
  "tricks" or linking schemes.

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• On its face, off-page SEO techniques sound more
  promising than on-page optimizations for targeted
  traffic growth since you can't really control it
  beyond writing copious amounts of quality content
  (which is assumed would be done anyway.) However
  there are too many spammy looking sites out there
  with a ton of backlinks that have high placement.
  It's up to you as the marketer whether those
  links are from reputable sources, but it's still
  not 100 certain. In my opinion, off-page is
  virtually impossible to control unless you engage
  in highly unethical practices which I would never
  recommend as a good SEO practitioner or as a web
  professional.

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SEM (search engine marketing) strategies include
PPC, banner advertising, and email marketing
which can be effective tools to improve SERP.
However they also come at a much higher cost than
SEO. Also, there are many people out there who
sell themselves as SEO consultants only to steer
unsuspecting companies toward PPC strategies
because it's more profitable for them . The
reason I say you should use social media instead
of SEM has nothing to do with the effectiveness
of these techniques it has everything to do with
how well you know your audience and what they
want from your site. I believe that small
businesses and individuals would benefit the most
from using content and social media marketing
than they would from SEM strategies. People who
are new to internet marketing often don't know
how to do SEO or social media marketing very
well, which leaves them open for exploitation in
the form of PPC nonsense. However, if you know
what your audience wants and deliver it to them
through content (like articles), they will
naturally come to you when you syndicate that
information across the web.
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Thank You