When people hear about online marketing, they often think of two of the more popular methods that a company can use to enhance its visibility on the Web: organic search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising.

SEO and PPC are search engine marketing techniques that are used to drive targeted traffic to your website. PPC, or Pay Per Click, ads are a way of buying visitors to your website by bidding on advertisement placements among the search engine results for specific keywords. Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a natural way of achieving top search engine placement by creating a keyword rich website with a strong linking structure. But which method is best for your company?

In an ideal world, you would use both strategically to maximize your site’s profile. However, budgetary constraints often make this impossible, and trying to do both on a limited budget or with minimal resources can result in neither campaign producing ideal results. In this case, it’s usually better to focus on one or the other. But which is best for you?

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Higher ROI

While both PPC and SEO marketing tactics have advantages, natural search engine optimization tends to have a higher return on investment (ROI) over time. In fact, a JupiterResearch study found that companies who outsource both their SEO and PPC campaigns show a significantly higher ROI with natural search engine optimization. Users tend to trust natural search engine results to be relevant to the information they are seeking, and are more likely to click on a natural SEO result.

Long Term Effect

Although using an SEO firm to create high search engine positioning for your website requires a higher initial investment than starting a PPC campaign, natural search engine optimization pays off over time. After your initial investment, your SEO website will require little to no additional cost to keep bringing in highly qualified traffic. With a PPC campaign, however, as soon as you stop investing money, your traffic comes to a screeching halt.

One big disadvantage of PPC is that it is increasingly vulnerable to click fraud. Click fraud is an attack on a PPC campaign to destroy its profitability. One example of click fraud is a robotic script that clicks a competitorâ??s PPC links over and over again, costing them money for each click with no real traffic coming to the site. Another type of click fraud involves repeatedly running a search without clicking on a PPC link, which can cause the advertisements to be disabled for having a click through rate that is too low. Although search engines do their best to hinder PPC click fraud, it is impossible to stop altogether. Natural SEO results are impervious to this kind of attack.

Pay-Per-Click

While the above points may make organic search engine optimization seem the clear choice in all cases, in certain situations it actually can make more sense to do pay-per-click advertising. For those looking for fast results on a small budget, a pay-per-click campaign may be the answer.

Quick Results

The results from pay-per-click advertising are immediate. On the other hand, an organic search engine optimization campaign may take up to three months or more for results to be apparent. In this case, pay-per-click is advantageous for those who are looking to promote an initiative that will go live in a short amount of time, or whose business is seasonal in nature and who only do promotion during certain months of the year.

Small Budget

Small businesses with extremely tight budgets may find that pay-per-click is a better investment than organic search engine optimization because a pay-per-click campaign will almost always cost less.

Easier to Handle In-House

Non-complicated pay-per-click campaigns can be handled much more easily in-house than an organic search engine optimization campaign.

No Contracts

Most organic search engine optimization campaigns require a contract of a certain length because SEO companies know that meaningful results will rarely happen overnight. When dealing with an in-house pay-per-click campaign, obviously a contract is not an issue.

Conclusion

Clearly, organic search engine optimization has some distinct advantages over pay-per-click advertising. However, there are undoubtedly certain situations and scenarios where pay-per-click advertising makes more sense fiscally and strategically. With a high enough budget, you would be able to have an effective organic search engine optimization campaign running in tandem with an effective pay-per-click campaign. But if you have to choose one, look into your unique situation before you decide.

So You’ve decided to have an online website for your business. Before doing you will need to follow the following 5 steps in before hosting your website online.

1. Design your Website

You will firstly need to design the website for this I would recommend hiring a Web Designer. Before contacting a web designers you should always check the portfolio and there skills. If you just want to advertise your business then you need to look for a web designer who knows how to use graphical programs such as Adobe dreamweaver, flash, fireworks and Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign as well as knowledge of HTML, DHTML, CSS and Javascript. However if you want to sell items online or have some technical calculations etc then you should get a web designer with knowledge of online Databases, PHP, MYSQL, perl, .net , HTML, Javascript and CSS

2. Search for a Domain Name

The Domain name is an important part of your website as this; is this web address of your actual website. You need to look for your business name in a domain name but don’t sign up to the domain name until you find a suitable hosting company in stage 3

3. Sign Up to a web hosting and domain company

You will now have to sign up to a hosting company which will also register your domain name. Look around and find the cheapest you can find and make sure you check the disk space can fit against your very own website as if your website is over 50 Megabytes (MB) and the hosting company has a hosting package that offers you 25MB disk space then you won’t be able to put your website within this hosting package as the disk space is to small. You should also check to see if they can give you a free domain name with this service as well as see whether you get a discount if you pay a year in advance.

4. Upload your website

Now that you have the hosting package you will need to upload the web pages to your website using a file transfer program this you can download for free or web hosting company may offer this to you. They will give you username and passwords wither by email or by post which you need to enter before you transfer the files online and it may take about 24 hours before your website is active so you may have to wait for a little while before you can upload your website to the internet.

5. Advertise Your website

The final step in having a website is advertising your website. This is a very important stage in creating a website as without it you will literally be invisible on the web. You will need to submit your website to search engines and make sure you have appropiate meta tag keywords on your website and within your content as this will attract the search engine to your website. You can exchange your web links with other web sites this is called web exchange and you can buy advertising space with on
selected websites.

As you can see you have a lot to think about when putting your website together however if you follow the steps that I have included in this article you should find that having a website is beneficial to you and your business.

Web design changes with lightening speed.  You want to stay on top of the new technology if you expect to get new clients.  Creating your website in Dreamweaver is a good idea but you want to know how to do all of the things in Dreamweaver without the program.  The reason why you want to be able to hand code is because there are things that are much easier to do by hand than by using Dreamweaver.

As a freelance web designer you should be well versed in Dreamweaver and Photoshop and all of the other programs that can be used to make websites beautiful.  However, you also need to know CSS and XHTML.  The notion that knowing the front end of Dreamweaver and other software without knowing the back end is not necessarily true.  You want to be able to offer clients a number of different options when it comes to your creative skills.

Finding work as a freelance web designer can be tough.  However there are a few places that you should get your website posted and advertise for work.  If you are looking for any type of freelance work there are a number of sites, such as Sologig.com that you can register with.  You will be able to post some clips and other information about what type of services you are offering.  Jobs postings from around the country can be found there.

Web designers typically get work online but you might be surprised at how much work you can get form word of mouth.  There is always someone that needs a website for something.  Some people have a product that they would like to sell online but have no idea how to put a website together.  Some schools would like to have a website for one of their sports teams but there is no one the staff that can do it.  These are great opportunities that you can get from just talking to people that you know.  Make sure that you tell everyone that you are a freelance web designer.  You will be surprised at how many people are interested in your services.            

It is important to have a rate chart established before you start looking for work.  There are plenty of people online that will try to get you to work for much less than what your skills are worth.  Check around and see what the standard rates are for whatever applications you are doing.  You do not want to spend item doing work for less than what you should be making.  Have a rate chart and stick to it.  O not let people talk you down on your rates.  Offer a money back guarantee if you do not deliver the work when you are supposed to with all of the attributes that are supposed to be there.