There will come a time when your business must be online. Marketing for the web is not similar too traditional advertising methods which are ineffective for successfully delivering viable results. If a business is not online in today's market, it is dead in the water. It is your duty to ensure that the correct protocols are in place, in order to launch your business to the top. Now, let's say you run a video game store and have decided to start selling your video games online. Congratulations, a long and difficult road lies ahead of you. Your idea may be revolutionary to you, but a swift search of ?Online Video games store? produces over twenty million results! So how do you reach the top? Either with pay per click [PPC] or search engine optimisation [SEO]. Both deliver excellent results and both have their place at different points of your online marketing campaign.



The first and most important point: SEO is free [theoretically] and PPC is not. SEO is almost a pure form of advertising, which can be controlled entirely by yourself is you so wish. When I mentioned that SEO is hypothetically free, I meant that it can cost nothing, but one should hire an SEO specialist to handle your campaign in order to capitalise all control of the all powerful keywords. Ah, the humble keyword. A keyword is a word which search engines spiders [an AI which scans websites for keywords, correct structure, grammar, etc] will pick up on, report back to its search engine and with this result, rank your site accordingly. So the better your keywords and sentence structure is, the more likely your chances will be to tame the SEO beast. SEO is in no way a quick solution to ranking higher on the search engines. This form of online marketing can take months, as many search engines only update their rankings on a month by month basis, depending on how frequently content is added. Consider SEO to be the ?silent-salesman? of your web marketing campaign. Always there, always working but needs time in order to grow.

To generate a large volume of traffic in a short amount of time, use PPC to rocket your site to the top of all search pages. ?Great, fantastic!? you say to yourself. ?Signing up now...? you mutter under your breath as you discover the costs involved. PPC is not for every business, but a boon to those who utilise it. Simply put, you bid for top-ranking keywords [such as Xbox, Playstation or Nintendo Wii in this case] and when your purchased keyword is searched for, your website sits as a sponsored link, typically on the right-hand side of the search results. Systems such as Google Adwords run PPC campaigns and will produce some excellent results, but Yahoo and MSN can be used as well. There are countless search engines to make use of, but these are the top three search engines and their results make up the lion's share of effective rankings. Consider this before embarking on a PPC marketing campaign: Does the cost of PPC offset the profit I stand to make or will make? If your earnings are substantial, then run with it and keep your sites ranking soaring until your SEO campaign fully kicks in.

These two options both provide positive and negative attributes to your online business. A truly effective company will employ both SEO and PPC in order to shoot their site to the top of the rankings. This is both costly and time-consuming but eventually financially rewarding. Research your options, approach online marketing companies to assist you in your decision and above all, never wane in your goal to become number one.