There seems to be two camps of thought on the best way to promote websites. Some people claim that search engine optimization (SEO) is the only way to go. Others say that paid search marketing, or pay per click (PPC), is the best way to go.

The reality is that these two methods should work together in harmony, rather than being thought of as separate entities where one methods excludes the other. If you use only one of these approaches it could result in the loss of money rather than having it in your pocket.

Most of the time, utilizing paid search marketing will end up providing traffic to you site faster than if you only relied on search engine optimization marketing. Often, you can start to see traffic and sales within a day of starting a paid search campaign.

Part of the power of paid search marketing, which is frequently overlooked, is the data that can be rapidly gathered from the success or failure of your PPC campaigns. The conversion rates for the search terms that you select for your paid marketing efforts, can give you remarkable insights into how to best optimize your pages for the search engines.

Most of the time, a paid search marketing campaign that is the most profitable will use long tail search terms. The bid cost on a long tail term is considerably less than targeting the primary single keyword, especially if it is a very popular or competitive keyword term.

So, long tail keyword phrases can be an effective way to get in the "back door" for a popular topic. Once you have a high conversion rate on your long tails, you can start to be very effective in your ability to implement search engine optimization on your pages for those phrases.

Because the organic search results or the non-paid listings receive as many as nine times more clicks than paid results, this becomes very valuable once you are able to do the search engine optimization for the long tail keywords that you know convert well. Over time, with good optimization, you can advance in the organic search engine rankings until you are ranked in the top ten, or front page. This is a much easier task with the long tail keywords, especially when you have the paid search marketing data to guide you in selecting which terms are best for optimization.

The main problem with depending completely on organic search engine optimization results, is that it takes time for your site to get listed and then to advance in the search engine rankings. As you continue your optimization efforts, it could take as much as  six months of testing and adjusting your pages to get them to the top search results position. However, it might not ever happen, depending on the competitiveness of your search term.

However, by using a strategy that takes advantage of both paid search marketing and search engine optimization, you can enjoy the best of both worlds and enhance the effectiveness of both approaches.

Tags: website content, website content management, internet marketing, website design, website development

Tags: website content, website content management, website design, internet marketing, website development