One strategy focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) while the other main strategy is pay per click advertising, otherwise known as paid search marketing.

The reality is that these two methods should work together and in harmony rather than being thought of as separate entities where one methods excludes the other, and using only one of these approaches can result in you leaving money on the table.

For the most part, using paid search marketing will give you much faster results than relying on search engine optimization marketing. With a paid search campaign you can start getting traffic to your website, and even start seeing sales or conversions, within a day, and sometimes even faster.

Part the the power of paid search marketing, which is often overlooked, is the data that can be quickly collected from the success or failure of your PPC campaigns.

The conversion rates for the search terms that you choose for your paid marketing efforts can give you good insights into how to best optimize your pages for the search engines.

Most of the time, a paid search marketing campaign that is most profitable will use long tail search terms because the bid cost on the listing 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 nine times more clicks than paid results, this becomes very valuable once you are able to do the seo for the long tail keywords that you know convert well.

Over time, with good optimization, you can advance in the organic rankings until you are listed on 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 which terms to focus your optimization on.

The main problem with relying solely 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.

Realistically, it could take a minimum of six months of testing and tweaking your pages to get them to the top search results position. And, it might not ever happen depending on how competitive that search term is.

But, using a strategic combination of both search engine optimization along with paid search marketing, you can get the best results in the fastest time and pave the way for long-term, stabile growth of targeted organic traffic.