Acronym overload! SEO, SEM & SMO??

Don’t we web marketing professionals just love an acronym? Is it because we want our clients to think we’re oh so clever? Why not just say it as it is?

Well the main reason for these acronyms is that the full terms are just so long and clunky!  But we in the web industry do need to remember that not everyone speaks the lingo.

To clear up any confusion, here’s an explanation of each, and what it should mean to you, in plain English:

SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
Search Engine Optimisation can be summed up as ‘Carrying out activities on the web with the aim of getting to the top of Google (and other Search Engines) for the keywords that are most important to you.’

The first thing you need to know when you look at search engine optimisation is how the search engines work.  Once you have an understanding of that then you can go out and tweak your website accordingly.

It’s all about relevancy.  If you are trying to rank highly for ‘washing machine repairs’ then you need to make sure that your website actually talks about washing machine repairs!  And then try to get other sites that talk about washing machine repairs to link to your website.

It’s slow work but will be worth it in the end – promise.


SEM = Search Engine Marketing
This includes SEO and also PPC – another acronym!  PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and covers Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter (Bing).

In a nutshell, ‘You appear towards the top of the search engines for the keywords that are most important to you, and you only pay when someone clicks on you’.

This can appear to be a really easy option, but it pays to be careful.  It can cost you a fortune for little return if you don’t pay attention to how you set up your campaigns.  Read this great econsultancy article about the seven deadly sins of PPC.

We wouldn’t advise setting up your own PPC campaign unless you’ve already had some experience or training – although once its set up you should be able to manage it yourself with a quick training session.


SMO = Social Media Optimisation
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, blogging, Flickr… the list is endless.  This is all about using social media to drive traffic to your site and build up relevant content that points back to your website.

You might not be able to use them all, indeed some of them might just not be relevant.  Don’t beat yourself up about this, you only have so many hours in a day and not everything suits everyone.

Start with just Facebook and Twitter and see how it goes - you might surprise yourself.  Make sure you keep linking back to your website from your tweets (Twitter updates) or your Facebook wall – this will help with SEO.  And try to engage with your followers / likers rather than just talking at them – you’ll get a much better response.


Need help with your SEO, SEM & SMO?
Well at least you now know what they mean!

You can do the basics of all of the above yourself if you have the time, but it can get quite involved and time-consuming.  If you need help with SEO, pop into our office in Basepoint, Ipswich for a chat and a cup of tea or drop us a line.

(More about what we do - Search Engine Optimisation Ipswich)

Is your website open 24/7 ?

Here at SimpleClick we pride ourselves on building websites that look great and are easy for your customers to navigate. But while we’re all about keeping things simple and logical for your customers on the front end, we’re not afraid to get our hands dirty ‘under the hood’ to build features into your website to enable that thing our customers like most – sales! 

Building payment processing and shopping features into a website can be a daunting prospect for some – fears about security and managing payments can result in businesses avoiding the issue altogether and sticking to traditional retailing methods. But with online retailing booming, customers expect to be able to buy items and services directly from a site using their credit or debit card. 

Why tie up your valuable time and resources manning the phones to take sales when your website could do it for you? And once the shops there, it’s working for you day and night – wherever in the world your customers might be.

We’ve recently launched sites that enable quick and convenient purchase through PayPal - take a look at http://www.houseofelliotcollection.com/ or http://www.lujos.co.uk/ for example. Managing payments via a trusted service like PayPal is easy. And sites hosted using our CMS also benefit from features that make managing orders and promotions really simple too.

We also recently completed a project to enable a customer to bulk process thousands of payments through Sage Pay (www.sagepay.com) in a fraction of the time it took previously. We built an application that allows the customer to simply upload payment files which are then processed automatically through the Sage Pay DIRECT API. It’s fast, secure and has greatly improved what was once a laborious process.

So whether you have an existing relationship with a payment service provider (such as Sage Pay, Google Checkout, World Pay, eWay, SkyPay – in fact, pretty much anybody!) or not, if you think your site or business could benefit from adding or automating payment services, come and speak to us.