Understanding the Difference Between SEO & PCC
Written by David Kalin   
Sunday, 14 March 2010 16:56
For any business owners out there who are trying to promote their website, there's a common question that seems to always pop up during this process. What is SEO, what is a PPC campaign and which am I better off using? Here's a brief and easy to understand explanation for those of you who may be new to internet marketing.
by DavidKalin


For any business owners out there who are trying to promote their website, there's a common question that seems to always pop up during this process. What is SEO, what is a PPC campaign and which am I better off using? Here's a brief and easy to understand explanation for those of you who may be new to internet marketing.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and PPC stands for Pay Per Click. Pay Per Click are the small website ads you will see on the right-hand side of the results page when you perform a search on Google. If you click on any of those right-hand side results you will be taken to the advertiser's website and the advertiser will be billed a certain amount of money for that "click-thru". How much money they have to pay depends upon many factors that I will not be going into in this article, however the costs involved are in the control of the advertiser and how he decides set up his campaign. The price per click can range anywhere from $0.25 cents up to $10.00 or even higher and this is dependent upon the keywords that advertiser is competing for alongside the other advertisers. These same types of ads are not only seen on Google but all over the internet on other search engines and even on some social networking sites.

SEO has no fees associated with it (unless you hire an expert to help you) but requires a lot of work and patience before it begins to pay off. For SEO to work you'll have to work on certain things such as website editing and meta tags, social networking and campaigning, link building, forum posting, press releases and the like... and you'll have to keep up with it for a long time before you'll make it to the first page. You'll also have to research the proper key words and phrases you should pick to optimize your site for so that your traffic will be properly targeted. The good news is that the fruit of your labor can get you listed high up in the search results "naturally" (on the left hand side of the page) and with minimal to no cost involved.

Both of these methods (SEO & PPC) can be used to get your website onto page 1 of a search engine results page. Pay Per Click campaigns cost money but if you're willing to pay enough per click you can immediately gain your website access to the first page (the right-hand side, remember?) Search Engine Optimization, although free of charge, is a long process that requires some basic knowledge and skills to perform. It can be a matter of months or more before your website would be listed high up enough to receive any real traffic but it is clearly the way to go here, unless you are willing to pay for PPC fees for the rest of your website's life.

It's best when first starting out to use both methods at the same time, eventually cutting down on the PPC as the SEO work begins to take over. Whether you're able to do the work yourself or you hire an expert to help, search engine optimization and pay per click advertising are here to stay and are the best options available right now for getting valuable, revenue driven traffic to your website.

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