SEO or Pay Per Click: Which is Better?

For anyone who may be new to getting an online business up and running here is a rather quick explanation of a couple of very important marketing terms you may have seen around. Understanding what they mean and how to use them will be crucial to your website’s success.

Pay Per Click advertising (known as PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (known as SEO) are 2 methods commonly used to be able to get your website to rank up high in the search engines so that people can easily find your site and then hopefully like what they see and make an inquiry or purchase. With PPC you are typically buying your way to the 1st page of the search engines by agreeing to pay a specified amount of money per click-thru on an ad you place there (every time someone clicks on your ad you will be charged this fee by the search engine company you are buying the ad from). You must have seen these ads many times already as they are the search results you’ll see on the right side of the page of most search engines. Every one of those right side results is an ad for someone’s website and if you actually click on one of those ads that website owner will be charged a fee.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of getting your website to rank naturally (without the use of PPC) on the search engines, and as high up as possible with the first page being everyone’s goal of course. These natural type listings are all the search results seen on the left-hand side of the search results page. It is said that 90% of search engine traffic comes from the first page. What this means is that if your website is not listed on the first page for certain popular key phrases then the vast majority of search engine traffic will be passing you by, unfortunately. There is no cost to you when someone clicks thru to your website using the naturally listed link, and this is the big benefit of being naturally listed high up in the search engines…it is free! SEO work consists of various on-page editing, website coding changes and spreading the word about your new site and business throughout the internet by using blogs, social networking sites, press releases, public forums and link building techniques.

Either one of these techniques (or a combination of both can be used as well) with enough effort put into it (or financial investment) will help get you to the top of the search engines. You’ll want to rank as high as you can because it is said that 90% of all search engine traffic comes directly from the first page. SEO work generally requires an enormous effort with tasks such as web page editing and coding changes, link building and blogging (among many other things) before the results will begin to shine through.

It’s best when first starting out to use both methods at the same time, eventually cutting down on the PPC as the SEO work begins to take over. Whether you’re able to do the work yourself or you hire an expert to help, search engine optimization and pay per click advertising are here to stay and are the best options available right now for getting valuable, revenue driven traffic to your website.

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