Pay Per Click or Optimization - Which is Best?

An idea seems to be floating around that a website owner needs to choose between pay per click advertising search engine optimization.  This is not true. 

The best way to maximize your Internet advertising budget is to do both. 

With pay per click advertising you get immediate results.  Upon completion of the sign in process your ad will be displayed on Google and, pending approval, on Google’s partner directories within a matter of days.  With Yahoo you site will be listed usually within three to five days.  There is no waiting for the search engine “spiders” to crawl your site and no mystery about how and when sites are ranked.  The only “downside” is that you pay for each click to your site.  Once the user clicks through to your site you want to make sure they have a good reason to stay long enough to fill out a form, send you an email or call.  This is where site optimization fits is so well with pay per click.

For those of you who have been put off by the shroud of mystery surrounding website optimization or by the thousands of dollars a month often quoted by optimizers, lay aside your fears.  The basic steps of optimization are not complex.   The cost of optimizing need not be prohibitive. 

Optimization consists of three basic steps:

1. Making sure all your current pages have meta-tags and are linked correctly with all the pages being linked from another page on your site.
2. Adding relevant content to your site on a regular basis.
3. Establishing links coming into your site from other places on the web. This can include article submissions (using the articles on your site), directories and blogs.

The advantages of optimization are: The potential of receiving free clicks through links and optimized pages, all the website content you will be adding to your site through the optimization process.

As you can see, for immediate advertising results, your must have a pay per click advertising campaign.  For longer term results, start optimizing your site now.

The main reason these work so beautifully together is that by doing the most important optimizing step (adding content to your site on a weekly or monthly basis) you will be enhancing the user experience and the overall quality of your site.