Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Search Engine Optimization


A marketing process used to appeal search engine algorithms and increase search engine relevance and ultimately web traffic is termed as Search engine optimization (SEO). This optimization relates to a variety of elements, like title tags, meta tags, alt tags, link structure, link popularity and the content of the site itself. Once the web site is properly optimized, the goal then is to make sure that each of the top crawler based search engines find your site and add as many pages as possible in their indices.

Search engine optimization involves the following:

1. Making sure the sub pages or at least the main areas of the site are accessible from the home page. It can be assumed that more number of optimized pages for different keywords will bring more traffic.
2. Making sure your site is listed in the major directories such as Yahoo and Open Directory to name a few.
3. Monitoring position of the site in the search engines.
4. Making necessary changes to the site to stay in top position.
5. Submitting to new engines or directories that come along as well.

When visitors or “clicks” are purchase from a search engine, it is called “pay-per-click” (PPC) search engine advertising (or PPCSE). In PPC, rankings are calculated for keyword phrases based primarily on the price that is being paid. The more you agree to pay per click (or bid) for a specific keyword and the more effective your ad, the higher your site will rank in the paid search results.

PPC advertising has many great benefits, first of all, you get your traffic going quickly. It serves to be the most useful when starting a new business or product. With PPC advertising, one can quickly and efficiently find out which keywords are needed to target and which products are the most popular. Once the experiment is done Search Engine Optimization comes into picture. PPC advertising can be very expensive, costing hundreds, even thousands a month in advertising costs. Search engine optimization requires a lengthy amount of time to get site rank high with the keywords.

PPC will neither help improve the positioning in the regular editorial search results nor optimize site to reflect identity. When one stops paying for PPC, it disappears and so does the traffic it brings. Oppositely a well executed SEO plan covers all these downfalls of PPC.