In my daily conversations with businesses and business professionals, I am continually surprised by the numbers which do not understand the different roles of Website Design specialists and SEO specialists. These are almost entirely separate specialties, with some overlap. In competitive markets, especially Residential & Commercial Real Estate, Mortgage, Insurance, Information Technology, Construction and many others, it’s critical that you not ignore either aspect of site development.  So, what’s the main difference between the two? Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is about getting people to visit your website. Design is about keeping them there, engaging them and converting them from prospects to leads… hopefully at a much higher conversion rate than non-professionally designed sites. Talk to you website designer and ask questions. Get educated. The more you know about how SEM functions the better chance you have in utilizing it your full advantage. Is it really that simple? Yes. Now you’re wondering, well, how and where do these specialties overlap? It occurs primarily in the final production work, such as writing HTML code. Another alternative is that your designer and/or programmer may install the site and then an SEM specialist may come back later and tweak the code, optimizing title tags, meta-tags, the content itself, links, etc. To summarize, SEM specialists are responsible for getting traffic to your web site. Designers are responsible for making your site look so good and function well that visitors will want to use the site and will convert to leads. Professional design combined with functional SEM can be the ultimate combination.

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