First let us distinguish one from the other...

Branding as defined by Capco Marketing is an ad campaign that focuses on introducing, re-introducing or enforcing the brand for a particular product or organization. Branding is one of the most unappreciated aspects of web advertising because so many people focus on click-through rates. This is unfortunate because studies have shown internet advertising to be highly successful in building brand awareness.

Simply, it is a school of that says, "If the customer has heard of us, we've done our job."

SEO or search engine optimization, as New Media Worldwide puts it, is the process of designing the web site to attract search engine spiders and improve a site's ranking for releant keyworeds within a seach engine's database. This process includes search engine and directory submission, which can require an inclusion fee.

SEO uses techniques that enable your site to appear higher in a list of search engine results.

The distinction leads me back to the title of my entry - SEO versus Branding. The latter is a marketing predicament that business giants will need to come to grips with online. Often companies will need to choose whether to promote their own brand name as their main keyword phrase or optimize for a more generic keyword phrase.

Hence, in order to produce the largest ROI, big businesses need to optimize their websites both for their own brand names and for the generic, high-traffic keywords and keyword phrases fitting to their sites. Otherwise, they will be letting tons of online opportunities slip away.