Search Engine Optimization or Paid Listing - Why Not Do Both

As broadband technology is getting more superior, the easy access to the Internet creates so many competitions that having only a website is not enough to make your business running and able to compete. If you want to successfully use your website to represent your business, you need to market your website.

A website with no traffic is useless. It will be like opening up a storefront in a deserted city where no one will ever visit it. Therefore, you need to make it known to the world and be visible. There are thousands if not millions of people out that on the Internet. Show your website to them and get people who are interested in your products or services to visit your website.

One of the best ways to market your website is to leverage on search engines. A lot of debates have been made on whether SEO or Paid Listing is better. In my opinion, both are essential if you want to have a successful search engine marketing campaign.

So what are SEO and Paid Listing? Let us briefly discuss them here:

1. SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Researches have shown that Internet surfers usually visit search engines such as Google and Yahoo when they want to look for information, locate any websites, or for any topic they desire. SEO is the process of getting your website to rank among the top organic results of a search so that Internet users can find your website.

To rank well organically, you need to build a site which is search engine friendly, as well as getting quality websites to link back to your site. In SEO, you will not need to pay for the clicks to your website. However, it is a very tedious process and it usually requires at least 6 months to have your site rank well on the search results.

2. Paid Listing. Paid Listing is sometimes known as PPC (Pay-Per-Click). With paid listing, you will be able to advertise on search engines. Your ad will appear on sponsored listings when some one makes a search. You will be charge whenever a visitor or web surfer clicks on any of your ads and visit your website. You will also need to bid for keywords and the highest bidder for the price of the click will definitely get the chance to get a better ranking.

However, with Google Adwords, it has thrown in a whole new level on playing field. Getting a good position in sponsored listings is not only depending on the amount of money that you pay anymore. Ad Relevancy plays a part now. By writing better ad tesxt and increasing quality score, you will be able to rank higher than someone who bids higher than you did.

Both SEO and Paid Listing are good methods to drive quality traffic to your website. The better way to approach this two methods is to evaluate your short term and long term plans. As SEO takes a longer time to show results, you may want to consider using Paid Listing to market your website first, while your SEO technician works on your optimization process.

Once your website is showing up in organic listings, you can either stop your Paid Listing campaign, or change the keywords in your Paid Listing campaign to target other parts of your business.

There are enormous untapped opportunities out there on the Internet. It is now up to you to derive the right strategy and market your business to the world.

About The Author-- Cheow Yu Yuan is the co-founder of HomeBizGears.com, an online marketing and branding agency. Check out more about Online Marketing and Branding at www.homebizgears.com

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