What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

[orientation]

SEO search engine marketing which gives organic traffic
SEM is a paid marketing which gives instant results.

[stuartspindlow22]

Informative information thanks for sharing.

[rohitnagpure336]

SEO stands for search engine optimization where people can generate free organic traffic through search engine.

SEM stands for search engine marketing where people can generate traffic but Paid.

[edwardsantiago]

SEM is Search Engine Marketing
SEO is Search Engine Optimization

SEM is promoting you products or services on the internet, and includes search engine campaigns like Google AdWords / AdSense, etc.

SEO on the other hand is promoting your website or blog to the search engines. SEO consists of various things that you do onsite and offsite in order to rank higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs) when someone searches for the keywords relevant to your website.

[diamond]

Search Engine Marketing is over and above SEO but it’s only a subset of your overall Internet Marketing Strategy. The diagram below shows the relationship between Internet Marketing, SEM and SEO.

SEO is the process of optimizing your web site for the purpose of getting free traffic from search engines. An optimized web site is more easily understood by Search engine crawlers, so there are more chances of ranking higher in SERPS.

[manogua]

The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim in increasing visibility in search engines. SEO is about optimizing the web property to get better rankings in the search results while SEM goes beyond SEO. It involves other methods as well which can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising.