The success of online business is very much dependant on how well a website ranks on the major search engines. There are many ways to gain high search engine placement, broadly speaking they can be called Search Engine Marketing. Search Engine Marketing is generally divided into two major groups.
1. Natural Search Engine Optimization i.e. optimizing for organic search results;
2. Pay-Per-Click advertising targeting paid-for or sponsored search results.
Natural or organic SEO aims at increasing the rankings of a website in unpaid search engine listings by means of extensive on-page and off-page optimization efforts. In simple words you improve your website for it to appear at the top of search results for particular search terms. Unlike Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising where you bid on the selected keywords to get your website listed in sponsored search results, organic or natural Search Engine Optimization is a much more complicated time and labor consuming process. Although it is harder to get, high organic placement is most beneficial in terms of targeted traffic. Statistical data proves that SEO is an extremely effective traffic generating technique, since most engine users trust organic listings more than sponsored links and many of them never use PPC results at all.
One of the major components of Search Engine Optimization is link building. Link popularity is a decisive factor used by search engines to rank a site. You need to generate quality incoming links to your site which may take quite a lot of time. On the upside however these links have a lasting impact on your search engine rankings, significantly boosting long-term targeted traffic.
The major benefit of Pay-Per-Click advertising is immediate results of increased prequalified traffic and sales boost just in a couple of days. If you can’t wait long for SEO efforts to take effect you can invest in a PPC campaign in the meantime. There are also a number of other advantages such as easy tracking of the conversion rates and, tuning of keywords. The biggest weaknesses of PPC advertising are high costs and low sustainability. Depending on the popularity of your keywords, a PPC campaign can cost you a pretty penny and although it starts bringing in traffic almost immediately, the results die out as soon as you stop financing it. Natural Search Engine Optimization on the other hand provides long lasting results and will bring more return for every invested dollar.
The rule of thumb in marketing states that whatever brings you a profit is worth doing. Although PPC is inferior to natural SEO in terms of sustainability, ROI and sometimes costs, it is a useful tool for a quick boost of traffic. Still if you want to ensure your online success in the long run, you need to invest in an extensive natural Search Engine Optimization campaign.