Search Engine Optimization vs. Pay Per Click = Buying vs. Renting

One of the best analogies to compare SEO versus PPC advertising is to consider the decision of buying versus renting a home.  If someone were to ask you if it is better to buy or rent a home, what would you tell them?  Hopefully you would tell them that it depends, right?  What does it depend upon?  Well, the price of course!  In the following exercise, it is very important to understand how to compare the prices of each option.

While many people would say that it is always better to buy than rent if you can, this is not always the case.  For example, lets say you have the option of buying a 3 bedroom, 2 bath house in a nice neighborhood for $250,000.  Is this a good deal?  Maybe its a great deal, but what if I told you I would rent it to you for only $100/month?  How can you go wrong?  You can see where even though we were taught it is always better to buy, there are situations where renting is better if it is cheap enough.  The biggest caveat to renting is the risk of the price going up in the future.

Comparing PPC versus SEO is a very similar exercise.  PPC advertising and SEO optimization both get you essentially the same thing, the use of valuable internet real estate.  The higher up you are on the pages you desire, the more valuable the turf!  When evaluating between these two core internet marketing strategies you need to take into account the cost of each.  This is going to depend on a number of important factors, including the keyword phrases you are targeting, the demographics you are targeting, and especially your geo-targeting.  Some industries like plastic surgery, weight loss, and internet marketing are extremely competitive, while others like awnings, aluminum products, and related are often not as difficult or expensive.  Nationwide campaigns are often more competitive than local ones, though not always.  Location plays a major factor.

The math to determine the better strategy between SEO and PPC is quite simple.  Similar to the cost of living in a home, either rent or mortgage payments are made monthly for the right to live in the home.  Lets break down the cost of PPC vs SEO in the same manner.  We need to determine the number of times your PPC ad is clicked per month, the cost per click, and the total monthly cost.  We then need to compare this number with the cost of getting your website ranked organically, or even receiving traffic from web 2.0 marketing techniques, to determine a fair comparison.  You can see the comparison is a little more complicated than saying PPC is better or SEO is always the best.

Any reputable internet marketing company should be able to provide some guidance for you in this SEO vs. PPC comparison exercise.  A good way to find one is to make sure you include the term “best” in your search query.  For example, you may want to try a search along the lines of “Best Internet Marketing Company” or something similar including the term “Best”.

As an owner of a internet business, Your ultimate goal is to get your website to the first page of Google. It is imperative that you know how to divert traffic to your website. People have realized the potential of internet as the powerful medium for marketing. Using the right resources for internet marketing is a vital strategy to attract visitors.

Building back links is an important step in search engine optimization. When you gain quality links to your website, search engines give more importance to your site. This enables the site to come up in the search results. Posting articles in various sites, directory listing, social book marking, forum posting etc are some of the major link building strategies.

You must consider several factors while acquiring back links. It is true that more inbound links increases the possibility of the site to top in the search engine results pages. But search engines give more importance to the quality of the links as well.

Many companies offer link building services at a cheap rate and provide low quality services to the clients. They acquire links from the link farms that search engines hate the most. Such malpractices are enough to bring your site down in the search engine results pages.

Black hat techniques employed in link building will be easily detected by the search engines. They will penalize your site and even drop it from their index. Amateurs in the field of SEO use black hat tricks to gain customers quickly.

Always try to acquire one way links from reputed sites. A single quality link is valuable than hundreds of low quality links. Look for those high quality web sites for building links. Check the page rank of the site, the number of inbound links and the age of the domain before you put the link. White hat seo link building services are the only way to get your website to the first page of Google. To find a link building service that will give you the type of links you need to reach front page of google you need to ask questions, ask for references, check references take your time this may be one of the most important decisions you can make about your website and its growth. Finding the right link building service may not always be the lowest cost to you, but you usually get what you pay for.

Link building strategies change with time based on the changes in the algorithms of search engines. Link exchange, a practice which was widely followed before, is found to be of little use now.

When you place the links, the anchor text must be related to your targeted keywords. Creating links with texts like “Click Here” or “Purchase Now” etc has less importance. Topical relevance of the anchor text is another important factor while building links. For example, if your site is about computers, it does not make sense to acquire links from a site based on skin care. The theme of the web sites must be related in some way.

Finding the right web site is also important. Efficient and experienced link building service providers use advanced techniques to find out such sites. They know various deep linking techniques, link wheel creation and other ethical or white hat SEO techniques to improve the rankings of the website.

Outsourcing the work to a good link building service provider allows you to focus more on your core competency. But finding the right link building service is critical if you want to achieve your goal of reaching the first page of Google.

Remember to ask questions, check references, ask what type of links they will place and follow up spot check on them to make sure they are doing the type of links you requested.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a subset of internet marketing, which uses a combination of free and paid techniques to ensure the achievement of the client’s objectives. The central idea behind any search engine marketing campaign is to ensure a high ranking for a website in search engine result pages. The need for Search Engine marketing arose because users wanted faster results.

Organic SEO techniques are time consuming and results usually take many months or weeks to show up. Clients who want instant results often resort to search engine-marketing campaigns, which include sponsored listings, pay per click campaigns and similar such paid techniques to obtain high ranking on search engines.

Sponsored listings are a sure shot way of achieving high ranks on search engines. Depending on the kind of money, a customer is ready to pay; search engines alter the ranks of companies in search results for certain defined keywords. Another way to achieve high ranking on search engines is to bid for certain keywords in search engines . Most search engines allow users to customize their ad campaigns in line with their advertizing and marketing budgets. By bidding for certain keywords, users can improve their rankings in search engine result pages. However, this method can prove to be quite expensive, as users need to increase the bids if their ranking does not improve in search engines.

Other paid methods of improving your website’s ranking are CPM and CPC. Cost per (thousand) Impression (CPM) technique enables users to pay for their advertisements only when the page has been rendered at least a thousand times on the browser of each unique visitor. A customer’s account is debited only after thousand impressions have been rendered. Such methods are however prone to fraud and require proper management through web analytical software’s.

Cost per Click campaigns on the other hand require user s to pay for each validated click made by web surfers. Users can set the lower and upper limits for the payments they are going to make to their advertisers on a daily basis. If users want, they can choose to pay for only those visitors who end up filling an online query form. This method will ensure that they end up paying for only genuine queries. However, this method is also vulnerable to fraud and requires web analytical software’s for effective management and execution.

Search Engine marketing has become immensely popular as it provides a measurable method for advertisers to evaluate the return on their advertising spend. Other mediums like print, TV, radio, although effective, do not possess the capability to inform advertisers about the direction of their marketing spend.