A recent piece I wrote for Journalism.co.uk drew quite some reaction not to mention about 200 emails which came through HelpMySEO on the subject which indicates perhaps that somewhere a raw nerve was touched. Now, I have written on the ability of writers and authors to affect SEO gains here before so the issue when it comes to journalism and SEO has less to do with ability and more to do with ideology and politics.

There is a fundamental difference between SEO and SEM. The former consists of crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s in an attempt to optimise a site to the point that it is search engine friendly (while being careful not to over-optimise it as that will then count against it) while the latter involves online marketing techniques which take into account viral social networks (like YouTube and FaceBook) the users of which are then utilised as inevitable assistant marketers.

You are wondering right now how the latest privacy wars amongst the big search engines are going to allow you to take advantage and make the most of your SEO efforts.

Make no mistake, anything which involves policy changes or competitive actions amongst the big search engines (and we are talking really Google, Yahoo!  and MSN in that order) is going to affect online search behaviour and SEO work.