Tuesday, September 29, 2009

SEO vs. Pay per Click Advertising

SEO

The term “SEO” stands for Search Engine Optimization. In short and simple terms, every search engine provides result based on a series of criterion, generally keyword and content related. The engine compares the search request to its index of websites and their descriptions, and provides the most applicable answers it can, ranked in order of precedence.

The first sites to come up are the most directly related to the search terms as the engine understands them. This is why different engines may rank sites differently - Yahoo, Google and MSN have different indexing and keyword criteria, so their responses to a particular search may vary. It is termed Organic SEO because the results are returned organically, there is no external interference changing the results, they simply return per the standard operating practices of the search engine.

Organic SEO has the benefit of having no inherent costs associated with it. Proper search engines don’t charge businesses for their ranking in the list, so the only essential investment is building a noteworthy site that generates the traffic and keyword results that will bring a high ranking. The downside is that it requires a great deal of research to properly take benefit of this strategy.

PPC

In pay per click advertising, businesses contact a search engine and bid on certain keywords relevant to their website. When someone looks for these terms, the search engine provides a link to this business in the form of a pay per click advertisement. The name pay per click approach from the fact that the company must pay the website a fee every time a user clicks the advertisement.

Pay per click advertising is eye-catching because it increases the odds of really snagging a targeted audience. Rather than having one result possibly come up in a search, there’s another result just off to the side, increasing the probability of gaining user attention.

No comments:

Post a Comment