Search engine optimization has come to mean a lot of things to a lot of different people. In the strictest sense, SEO is about the on-page and off-page design strategies you can use to improve your search engine ranking. This usually means tweaking your web site, using design elements and content, and in most cases, it also means spending no money at all. Search Engine Marketing, is not just SEO. SEM includes PPC or pay-perclick advertising, meaning you have to set aside a budget to accomodate those clicks on the internet from users.
Search engine marketing is about doing whatever you need to do to ensure that your web site ranks as high as possible in search engine results. This means not only that you make the needed changes to your web-site design, but that you also employ other tactics, like using a paid advertising program or investing in content strategies. The ultimate goal of SEM is to bring more people to your web site and you can do that by improving your (SERP) search engines results.

You can also do that by taking advantage of a growing phenomenon on the Web, social media. Social media is a viral form of sharing information on the Web and using social media to improve the traffic to your web site is called Social Media Marketing, or SMM. All these marketing efforts have one thing in common which is reaching your target audience. Today anyone who is not an SEO purist places all these marketing methods under the SEM umbrella, and all of these marketing methods are methods for optimizing your web site for the audience that you are trying to reach. As social media grows in popularity, they are going to be affected by and included in search engine results as well.

Every now and then, you need to step away from the crowd and stop doing what everyone else is doing. In SEO, stepping out alone is usually rewarded with better traffic results since everyone is doing the same thing. What this means is that you should do the same thing in a different way.
The best practices for search engine optimization provide insight into the theory behind the strategies that you will learn and these strategies are tested. Follow the best practices of search engine optimization and do it creatively by trying something different. That is how blogs became such a huge phenomenon and is how social bookmarking and social communities caught on. Someone looked at marketing in a different way and came up with a new angle to approach SEM.
There are numerous resources offered with this course that will help you to complete it successfully. You will come across the resources listed below as you progress through the course.

Remember, you can reach the Sitemap page at any time throughout the course by clicking the Sitemap tab.

Throughout this course, You will have the opportunity to review definitions of key terms. These terms are defined in the course glossary. The glossary terms appear as italicized words in the lesson text of the individual modules.
All of the glossary terms can be examined at the following link.
SEO - Glossary
In the next lesson, the virtual learning environment will be discussed.