An affiliate marketer’s best friend is the website; it’s the primary means for selling products or services. And if you want to increase your customer base, you need new traffic to it.

So, enhancing your website’s search engine ranking is critical. This is where the acronyms SEM (Search Engine Marketing) and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) — two terms that tend to be mixed together in a sort of alphabet soup — come in.

A search on both terms will result in lists of websites for companies promising to increase the number of hits to your site – for a small fee, of course. One such website offered its services within the content of its title tag: “Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing.”

Now, if you’re new to affiliate marketing, SEM and SEO may be confusing. Isn’t the idea behind SEM to optimize your presence on the Internet? Well, yes, and SEO is basically one component of SEM. However, here’s the difference between the two:

- SEM is the general use of marketing methods designed to make a website more visible to Google and other search engines. These methods include paid search methods, such as pay-per-click advertising, as well as SEO.

- SEO, however, is an organic search marketing method used to make a website rank higher.

It’s easy to think of “organic” as costing more money, especially if your only exposure to “organic” is in a boutique grocery. But “organic search” is simply what comes up when you search for a term on a search engine. SEO is a way to make sure your website gets its share of the “free advertising” that the search results can provide, without necessarily having to pay for it.

Now, PPC (pay-per-click) can get your product or service prominently mentioned, if you want to spend the money. Or, you can pursue another SEM method: the link exchange – sort of a “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” arrangement with another affiliate that requires finding just the right partner.

However, it’s been proven time and time again that if you want to maximize profits from your affiliate marketing, SEO is the way. And the best part is that it’s something you can achieve yourself – without having to dig deep in your wallet!

You need a website and some basic knowledge of HTML – something you should have anyway, right? You also need an understanding of what keywords your customers, real and potential, use when searching online for the kinds of products and information you can provide. Make certain your website revolves around those keywords, and make sure your site works with the search engines.

Sure, it takes some homework to see which specific keywords are used more than others. But it’s part of attempting to understand what your customers need and want, which every good affiliate marketer does already. Without that understanding of your customers, it won’t matter how much you pay for PPC – you’ll have bigger problems than just getting your website noticed!

So, to increase your business as an affiliate marketer, consider other SEM options if you wish to see if they might work for you. But trust me, it’s worth your time to work on SEO.