Thousands of new web domains are registered daily on the world wide web, each with the hope of striking gold. On the internet, as with offline businesses, most of these new sites will fail to achieve their intended and hoped for targets. Much too numerous new webmasters go into the process blindly, designing sites without doing the proper research, and doing the appropriate preparatory work. There are also a lot of website owners who don't even know what search engine optimization (SEO) is, how it can help, and how to execute it properly.

Admittedly, some sites are successful despite this shortcoming, but these are the exceptions rather than the rule. To improve the chances of your website's success, you will need to put in a bit of effort into doing SEO correctly.

When SEO is at the heart of the web venture, it will give you a significant edge over your competitors and unlike many other services you will spend your money on, SEO will almost certainly produce more profits than it costs. It should be stressed here, that nothing and nobody can guarantee your site's rankings within the major search engines. On the other hand, applying a few proven SEO tactics should see your rankings improve in Google, and the other popular search engines such as Yahoo and Bing.

Far too often though, website owners see search engine optimization simply as an afterthought, often well after their web sites have already launched. Failing to familiarize yourself with the long-lasting benefits that SEO can give your site, while not a recipe for disaster, will guarantee that you are not benefiting as much from your website as you should.

Dependent on the size and classification of your organisation, and website, there are several groups of people who should be involved in SEO for your website. These can include the Marketing, as well as the IT departments. For smaller websites, these roles are carried out by just one person, usually the webmaster. In many larger companies though, it is usual to find numerous individuals per department working on, and involved with the website's SEO. Quite often too, bosses will hire SEO experts to help them get their SEO strategies perfectly right.

Broadly speaking, search engine optimization can be considered as the sum of all the work required to produce a lot of targeted hits from search engines, third party websites, and web directories. Its greatest goal is to drive lots of targeted traffic. That's the essence of it really. SEO will involve research both onsite, and also of third party websites. Getting the proper website development and architecture will be as essential as back linking.

Understanding your competition will require research into competitors websites, and keyword research, leading to the appropriate content development and promotion. This last bit is very important, because much of SEO is writing the right content, and building back links. The importance of content cannot be stressed enough, but also, neither can the importance of increasing the number of incoming links to pages on your website, particularly for search engines like Google.

Search engine marketing (SEM) on the other hand, refers primarily to the use of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns on search engines. One of the most popular examples of this, is Google's AdWords program. SEO and SEM do share a few common elements, but they are different. PPC advertising is generally understood to be far easier to put into place, usually delivering new visitors to your site in minutes. As a result, many online website owners sometimes confuse SEO with SEM. Doing this however, could be very expensive.

SEO is not free. It does take work and effort, and it can be expensive too. That said though, it is certainly the cheapest way of driving traffic to your website available today. SEO also has the benefits of delivering long term traffic and value to your site. SEM stops delivering the minute you stop paying for your PPC adverts. SEO however, will carry on to send traffic to your site long after your initial efforts.