Web Site Promotion – SEO Or PPC?

The beauty of the web to Internet marketers is that millions of surfers can be accessed from any computer station in the world at a price of pennies per thousand, if not cheaper. Having said that, there is a great deal of competition which makes the struggle for a ascent from obscurity not as simple as it might first appear on the face of it.

In the early days of the Internet, there were not so many web sites so merely having one put your firm out in the forefront in its field. However, nowadays, merely having a web site is definitely not enough – every boy and his granny has a web site.

Therefore you require a strategy to make your web site more famous. The two most successful strategies are SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click).

Most surfers use a search engine to find what they want on the Net and most people using this method use Google. Therefore you ought to be optimizing your site for Google. There are thousands of books and pieces written on this subject, but basically it means refining your web site so that Google is in no doubt whatsoever which keywords you would like to rank for.

SEO methods take time and consideration to implement, but once they are in position they are there for ever or until you alter the purpose of your site. For example, if you wanted to begin selling flower pots instead of flowers. SEO is the permanent, but slow-acting tactic to promoting. It is also economical, because you can do it yourself.

Pay per click advertising is faster-acting than SEO, but it is more costly. With PPC marketing, such as Google’s Adsense / Adwords system, you pay someone (through Google) to host your adverts, but you only pay when someone clicks through to your web site.

In theory this means that you are only paying for people who come to your web site. These people are them expected to purchase, but the fact is that there are tyre-kickers out there, so you will end up paying for clicks that do not result in a sale.

Not only that, but the first place in the PPC advertisers’ ranking goes to the highest bidder, so you might be number one in the list today and number six tomorrow. But no one will tell you, you have to remain on top of it.

However, if you get it correct and that is not as easy as it appears, results can be almost immediate. There is very little delay – the campaign starts today and so does the selling and the billing. If you get it wrong, you could use up your budget in hours without earning a single cent. If you get it correct, you could have sold out the same day.

The truth of the matter is that all web sites should be optimized for the search engines anyway, but you might want to conduct an extraordinary campaign at special times of the year like Christmas. The two types of promoting are not mutually exclusive.