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One difference is that "social democracy" is more clearly defined, both by originally European doctrine and practices; while "liberal democracy" is quite vague. What adds to the confusion is that "liberalism" in the US in particular is often associated with "socialism," although historically liberalism in the US emerged as a form of "defensive" or what Marx would have called "bourgeois socialism"--socialist concessions designed to protect capitalism, a strategy invented by Bismarck, who was neither a socialist nor a liberal.
Social democrats are motivated by social equity and justice. But they are also democrats, so they rely on the voters to determine those goals. The tacit assumption is that most voters are rational and rationality in the relevant sense is that they know how to vote in self-interest. Since most people are poor, working-class, or working middle-class, theoretically, if these people unite to vote in common self-interest, wealth should wind up distributed, in the form of taxes and government benefits, to the majority of the population. (By contrast, anti-democratic socialists, e.g., communists, do not trust the people to act in self-interest.) In practice, social democrats have historically settled for large government social welfare programs, like universal health care, free education, pension plans, unemployment insurance, guaranteed minimum income, etc. In Europe, especially on the Continent, not even conservatives challenge too many of these institutions.
Liberal democrats are a much more amorphous bunch since they have less clearly defined goals. The basic commitment is in democracy, with emphasis on personal liberty and guarantee of personal rights. Historically, however, because of the commitment to democracy--and not liberty--many liberal politicians have wound up advocating for socialist policies; exactly for the same reasons above-mentioned: most people are poor, working class or working middle-class; and, assuming rationality--in the above sense--they'll vote for policies or representatives who favor the interests of the majority. In practice, this natural majority coalition of individual voters can be--and, in the US, have been--fractured by appeal to certain regional and cultural values, like racism, homophobia, religious zeal, etc., which may--and have--contradicted liberal values, especially protection of individual rights. Opponents of liberals have then leveraged this fracture in the natural majority to oppose socialist policies. This is how the poor and the working middle-class wind up voting against their own economic self-interest.
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