PPC Advertising & Organic Optimisation

Search engine marketing is split into two different categories, PPC Advertising and Organic Optimisation. Before you start on your internet marketing campaign, it's important to know the difference between the two.

If you are starting to market online, you will probably want to know what these two terms are as you may have heard them before. These are essentially the two main types of internet marketing and each one has its own benefits and disadvantages. This short article will show you the basics of each one.

PPC Advertisingr
Pay Per Click Advertising was an idea which was introduced by Goto.com back in 1998 at a conference a company which later became part of Yahoo. Google later introduced PPC advertising in December 1999 and it became the company's biggest earner. It works by simply bidding on keywords and the highest bidder gets their site listed at or near the top of the search engine index results when that particular keyword is entered. In addition, the website must pay the search engine company (in this case Google) $1 for every time that someone clicks on the link.

It sounds like a foolproof plan as logically, the more people that visit your site then the more business it will generate. Unfortunately, many people found themselves hit with the 'Google Slap' a term coined to describe the hefty bill a user might run up at the end of the week. This was because of people clicking on the site, not buying anything or availing of it's services, and then clicking off. The company still had to pay for every visitor but didn't have the turnover to fund it. From Google's perspective, it was the responsibility of the website to turn those leads into sales. However, when done correctly, it yielded extremely quick results and could greatly improve sales in the short term.

Organic Optimisationr
If a company didn't have the budget to use a more traditional PPC campaign, the alte
ative was organic optimisation. This was done by employing a series of techniques used to help list a site high on the search results, purely by it's content. This is actually something which is encouraged by Google. It demands that the webmasters and businesses focus on relevancy and keep the end user as the first priority at all times i.e. making sure the most relevant results reach the right people. Unfortunately, this isn't perfect either. This is a longer process as it can take a site a few months to get listed on the search results. However, the results last a lot longer and ensure that the right people will be directed to your site more tha
PPC would, making it easier to sell to them.

There are SEO companies that will help you in both of these techniques as each can work extremely well, but it's strongly recommended that you use someone with experience in optimisation to ensure that your site has the best chance.