For increased traffic and sales combine the power of organic (free) and pay-per-click search engine marketing. Together, they will help you reach your goals of more traffic and sales in both the short AND long term.

The trick is to use both search engine marketing strategies so that they build on each other.

Step 1. Do your keyword research and then build a content-rich site around keywords your market is searching on.

Step 2. Now pile on some pay-per-click advertising, with each ad built on a single keyword. Use PPC to bring more visitors to your site and measure your sales per visitor, called your sales conversion rate. Your PPC campaign will quickly show you which keywords bring in the most visitors, which result in the most sales and which ones are duds.

Step 3. Take the best performing keywords from your pay-per-click campaign and tweak your website with them. By emphasizing them in your content and code, you will start ranking hihgly for those keywords in the organic listings (the regular listings that come up when someone uses a search engine like Google).

You can build landing pages when you find a group of top-performing keywords that are related. Build a page that contains specific information that relates to that group of keywords that would appeal to searchers who are using those keywords.

PPC will bring first time visitors to your website for the answers to their search queries. By finding out what works in PPC, you can edit the keywords on your site to get a higher search engine ranking; over time this will build up free traffic.

And here's an added bonus! If you can get both your PPC ads and your organic listings on the same page of the search results you will have a search engine marketing strategy that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Search engine optimization and PPC, with a delicious keyword filling it's a search sandwich!