There are many forms of paid advertising such as email marketing, directory listings, banner advertising, and pay per click advertising. Today we will discuss the benefits of pay per click advertising.

Pay per click advertising is where you place a text or banner ad on a website like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and only pay when someone clicks on your ad. The pros of pay per click are you get immediate targeted traffic coming to your website. The cons are when you run out of money you run out of traffic.

The second form of advertising is free advertising. Some free types of free advertising are search engine optimization, free ad placement on directory sites, blog, article writing and publication, and many others. Today we will discuss search engine optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is the process of organizing your website information where search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN can find it and place your website in the free search area for major keywords being searched by people in need of your services. The pros of search engine optimization are that every visitor that comes through your site by this method has not cost you anything. The cons are that it takes lots of time and effort getting the search engines to see all the optimizing you have done on your website.

So which ones for me you ask. If you have a new website it will take several months for search engines to place you in good position in the natural or free listings after using all the search engine optimization techniques needed to outperform your competition. You may want to spend some money on pay per click until you see your natural listings move up in positions where they are showing next to the paid listings. Once this happens, you can turn you paid listings down and target keywords you want to get traffic from but have not yet reached the positions in the free placement.

To maximize your website traffic you must utilize both natural website placement as well as pay per click placement. The more exposure you have across the web, the better your chances of having quality visitors land on you website doorstep.

Remember using both pay per click and search engine optimization takes an experienced marketing professional that can read reports and make adjustments accordingly to maximize your return on investment.