Search engine optimization should not be approached as a hobby or just some kind of kids game. When approached professionally, it can yield excellent results for you and have you competing for searchers attention on the first page of search engine rankings on the top search engines.

SEO search engine optimization generates traffic for your website because of the list rankings that your sites achieves when search results are displayed. Because the results are naturally listed, and are not paid for, they are call organic results, as opposed to the results shown from pay per click advertising.

When people use one of the top search engines, they are presented with a mixture of paid results and organic listings. Those doing the searches are nine times more likely to click on the non-paid search results, which is an excellent illustration of why search engine optimization is so important and powerful.

You can certainly kick off the marketing efforts for your website by using paid search marketing methods, as this will get you traffic quickly, but of course you are paying for each visitor to your site.

If you have not tested your site and know that it has a high conversion ratio, or a high percentage of visitors who make a purchase when visiting your site, then pay per click can be a very costly route to take.

However, if you focus your paid search efforts on long tail keywords that are relevant to your site, you will have less competition for those terms and you will be able to get a high position of a paid listing for a much lower cost per click.

This can often be a good strategy to begin testing your conversion ratio, and once you have established a good conversion rate, it might still be profitable to go after more competitive, higher cost, search terms.

One of the critical components to being able to effectively carry out successful pay per click marketing strategies is good keyword research.

Taking time to study related keyword terms and phrases will reveal keywords that you can target that have less competition, or that might even be a better fit and more relevant for your particular site.

Not doing proper research into related keywords can end up costing you time and money and lead to frustration in your marketing endeavors.

The information that you gain from paid search marketing can also be very beneficial in your SEO search engine optimization efforts. You can use your conversion rates for different keyword terms or keyword phrases to help you know what terms you should optimize around so that you can improve your organic search engine rankings for those terms.

The most beneficial long-term strategy is to employ a combination of both paid search marketing and SEO search engine optimization. These two approaches working together will yield both fast traffic and revenue and long term growth in organic traffic from the major search engines.