Nope! I am not referring to Whole Foods and their products; better yet, to SEO & SEM.

As a marketing student myself, I had to learn the tediousness that goes into search optimization and marketing. Very technical stuff, but simply put, SEO (search engine optimization) is ensuring that the words and phrases on your site, blog, and other online content are found by the search engines and that, once found, your site is given the highest ranking possible in the natural search results. SEM (search engine marketing) means using search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc) to reach your customers directly.

Here is an image that shows what I am talking about:

The links identified at the top of the page have a little badge icon that says "Ad". Those marketers really got smart now; remember when those links had a yellow background signaling loud and clear that was an advertised link? I tell you as a consumer, the little badge did fool me at first.

To improve your SEO & SEM it all goes back to my first post on how it is important to build great content for your buyers. It is ineffective to try to reach buyers with broad, general search terms; the goal here is to drive consumers directly to the actual content they are looking for.

Everything always has to do with your audience; what are they looking for? what are they thinking? what do they need? how do they want to find what they are looking for? As a consumer do you trust someone who paid to show up at the top of the list or do you trust the ones who conducted extensive research and work to make sure you would land on the exact content you were looking for?