Today online advertising has become one of the most basic mediums to promote a business and make your presence felt in the market. The need of the hour is to draw customers to your website by creating successful campaigns coupled with unique ideas and quality products and services.

Since the concept of online business has taken a front foot in the competitive market, it is important for businesses to realize that they need to dedicate their time and efforts more towards website advertising and marketing.

You may be in a quandary as to which technique to employ for advertising your website. First, before you employ any technique to promote your site, the golden rule is to clearly define goals that you wish to achieve. This will guide you in selecting techniques more appropriately and help you maximize your results within your budget.

Regarding the techniques, there are two options that have gained a lot of popularity in the recent times. These are:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is the activity of improving the volume and quality of real time traffic to your site by optimizing your web pages. The SEO technique involves getting the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user.

Pay Per Click (PPC)
This is an advertising model which requires an advertiser to pay when a user clicks on the ad. Advertisers select keywords that they want to run on and which are relevant to their business and then bid on these keywords. Bids may vary from keyword to keyword depending on how important and relevant the keyword is for the business. The advertiser’s ad shows under the sponsored links when a user types in a search query which matches the advertiser’s keyword.

Many times some commercial websites make use of both these options simultaneously to advertise their website. This is also a smart option as it not only leads to better website exposure and visibility but also ensures a better ranking and real time traffic to your site. However, gaining a better understanding of both these methods by analyzing their pros and cons can help you gauge which technique would be more suitable for you and is in align with your business objectives.

Search Engine Optimization Pros

More Credibility – By showing on top of search results you can enjoy more credibility because real time traffic and popularity is achieved by putting in lot of time and effort. The ranking is achieved purely on the basis of quality content and relevance.

Free Placement – Unlike PPC, you do not have to pay for the clicks you receive from organic search results. Getting on the top position is a matter of how well you optimize your site in relation to your competitors. It also saves you money in the long run once the process takes off well.

Improved Website Ranking –SEO also helps you attain a better site ranking with little effort. You can also hire SEO professionals like SEO Traffic Spider who can carry out the optimization task on your behalf which will reap you the benefits in the long run.

Qualified Traffic – You can expect a good amount of qualified real time traffic to your site as a result of increased recognition of search engines.

Long Lasting Results – The results you achieve from this method are more lasting and stable. Also, it gives you a much higher return on your investment. This is because usually users tend to click on organic search results when compared to PPC ads and this brings more traffic for less.

Search Engine Optimization Cons

Time Consuming – SEO is a complicated task and requires enormous amount of time and effort to implement it the right way. Sometimes it may also require you to completely modify the structure, layout, presentation, or content of your website to make it search engine friendly and also enhance user experience.

Results May Take Time – The true impact of SEO efforts cannot be known immediately. It will not give you instant results in terms of traffic and may take some time for your site to get the desired traffic. This time gap may affect your profitability till the time you start seeing true results.

Pay Per Click Pros

Instant results – This method brings you immediate results in terms of traffic, leads, or sales. In a matter of few hours or days you can begin to show on top of the sponsored links and enjoy the benefits of increased traffic flow.

Appropriate for Temporary Offers – This would be an ideal option for those who want to gain an entry into the online market for a short term or for those with temporary product/service offerings. This is because they can hope to gain better visibility and exposure by bidding higher on keywords rather than waiting for SEO to be implemented and return results.

Easy to Implement – PPC can be easily implemented without devoting much time and effort to it when compared to SEO. It also enables the advertiser to experiment with different keywords and landing pages to see what works best. You can also bid on a variety of keywords that you want to run on and which cannot be practically placed in your web pages when implementing SEO.

Pay Per Click Cons

Expensive – It is an expensive option as it eats up on your profit margins. Also, you end up paying even for clicks that may not convert into sales. Additionally, in case of click fraud, you may end up wasting a considerable amount of your budget on fraudulent clicks.

A thorough analysis of the pros and cons of both these approaches will help you decide which option would be more suitable for your advertising needs. However, the main highlight here is that PPC serves well as a short term strategy over SEO. It is a good option for those looking for quick results and a good ROI while waiting for their SEO initiative to ramp up. However, using the PPC model will leave you with thinner profit margins. From the long term perspective, search engine optimization will bring in higher profitability and make the most of your advertising dollars as it will extensively increase your margins in the long run.

In recent years the concept of SEO has gained a lot of importance. The terms White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO have emerged universally as a marketing strategy to increase a website’s relevancy and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The SEO industry uses various techniques which can be ethical or unethical depending on the approach SEO professionals wish to adopt for optimizing pages.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results and also boosting real time traffic to your website. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of the White Hat SEO process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings and also rank stability.

The whole idea behind White Hat SEO is to ensure that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. The content that you would find on the webpage would not be solely for the search engine but also keeping the visitor in mind.

White Hat SEO Tactics:
Internal Linking
A simple way to hinder a good website ranking on the search engine is by making it tough for the search engines to spider and index pages. Several websites may use scripts to provide fancy drop down navigation and so on but unfortunately these scripts will not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. They will go unnoticed by the search engine spiders since they are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, scripts, frames, directories, etc.

Creating a site with scripts and fancy navigations may enhance the look of your website; however, it will prevent the spidering of your site. Therefore, it is essential to add text links at the bottom of your landing page linking to your most important internal pages including the sitemap.

Reciprocal Linking
Building reciprocal links is another White Hat SEO technique where you exchange links with other sites to get additional incoming links to your website. However, you must remember the following points when linking to other sites:

1. Link to sites that are relevant to yours
2. Consider linking to sites which have content that will appeal to and interest your visitors
3. Link to sites that have keywords you wish to target

Since this process is tedious and time consuming, avoid randomly linking to any site that you come across. This will not only lead to wastage of time and effort but also not bring in any results in terms of achieving a high search engine ranking.

Creating Content
This is an important part of the SEO process where compelling text has to be created that will attract more visitors to your site and add more value to your web pages. Creating a content rich website will not only boost visitor traffic to your site but will also lead to better recognition and indexing of your pages. Also, there would be many webmasters out there who would want to link to your site if they find it to be a good resource on their subject. Though content creation may take a lot of time, it will be worth the time and effort in the future.

Optimizing Your Website
This is another White Hat SEO technique which has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. Optimizing your site to improve its layout, structure, presentation, and content can help you gain better visibility and exposure.

Search engine optimization is the activity of improving the volume and quality of real time traffic to web pages or whole sites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords. Most often a website that gets a higher position or ranking in the search results is the one which the searchers will visit more frequently. Therefore, it is important that a site is optimized to get real time traffic the right way to make it more search-engine friendly and get a higher rank in the search results.

Though SEO helps in boosting real time traffic to a website, it should not be considered as the marketing of the site. It may be easy for one to pay and appear in the paid search results for a set of keywords, however, the concept behind the SEO technique is to get the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user.

The amount of time that can be spent on optimizing a website to get real time traffic can range from a few minutes to a long term activity. If your product or service is such that the keywords used are uncommon, then some general SEO would be sufficient to get a top rating. However, if your product or service industry is competitive or is in a saturated market, then it is important to dedicate considerable amount of time and effort for SEO. Even if one decides on simple SEO solutions, it is necessary to understand how search engine algorithms work and which items are crucial in SEO to get real time traffic.

The marketing approach that SEO adopts for increasing a site’s relevance is consideration of how search engines work and what searches are performed by users. The SEO process attempts to concentrate its efforts on a site’s coding, presentation, structuring, and also resolving issues that prevent search engine indexing program from spidering a website entirely.

Additionally, SEO efforts also include inserting unique content to web pages to make it more attractive to users and also to ensure that the search engine robots can easily index the content. Optimizing a site to get real time traffic can either be done by in house personnel or outsourced to professional optimizers who carry out SEO projects as a stand-alone service, like us – SEO Traffic Spider.

SEO tactics can be varied to achieve top ranking in search results. These fall into three categories (White-Hat SEO, Grey-Hat SEO, and Black-Hat SEO) depending on legitimacy and ethics.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results for real time traffic. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of this process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings.

Grey Hat SEO uses tactics which may be considered legitimate if they are used correctly. However, these have been subjected to misuse by unethical SEO’s and webmasters. It is possible that your website will not get penalized or banned for using this strategy and it may be necessary to use this process at times, however, webmasters are careful in the use of these tactics. This is because search engines may penalize tactics that are subjected to abuse even though they are used in legitimate forms.

Black Hat SEO employs techniques that are considered illegitimate and ethically incorrect and which have been or will surely be penalized and cause your website to be banned by search engines. Since Black Hat SEO is subject to abuse widely because it tends to harm search engine user experience, it is highly recommended to avoid using it as a means of attaining high ranking.

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Let’s face it, you can set up the most beautiful site in the world by the most professional web designers and still make zero profit if you do not know how to promote your site. What you need is traffic! Without traffic, your site is like a mansion in the middle of the Sahara desert and nobody will ever visit you. You need tons and herds of traffic that will cause a stampede and trample your site in an unstoppable manner! Only then can you earn money online non-stop and blow your profits through the roof.

But what happens if you are starting your online business on a shoestring budget and still need traffic. Well, the good thing about the internet is that it can allow the “little guy” to earn money online along with the big boys even with a low starting budget. With a bit of effort, the little guy can succeed as much as the big boys do. The following are some of the free methods to generate massive traffic to your site and let you earn money online with absolutely no costs at all.

1. Article Writing and Submission
This is by far the most rewarding free method and has stood the test of time as a powerful traffic generation strategy. Using your expertise and knowledge to write compelling and informational articles and submitting them to online article directories will reward you with more benefits than you can imagine. Your articles will come with your own resource box where you are allowed to place your own description and website links in them and allow the reader to click through to your website. Readers who like the information in your articles are going to perceive you as an expert in the field and are already pre-sold thus gaining you immediate credibility. By the time they reach your site, you are an expert in their eyes and whatever you sell on your site will seem like a million dollars to them and you will earn money online effortlessly.

Another huge benefit of article writing and submission include the backlinks that lie in the resource box. Many article writers who have no search engine optimization knowledge (SEO) will perceive the resource box as only a gateway to their site. But article writers with SEO knowledge will understand that backlinks are actually an important aspect of ranking high in search engines to earn money online. The text used with the backlinks known as “anchor text” determine what keywords your website will actually rank high in. This brings us to the next free traffic generation technique.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Contrary to what many people say, search engine optimization (SEO) is not rocket science. With a little study and research, you will discover that the common techniques to rank high for the keywords you want are actually very simple. Here are some simple tips to get you going with SEO to earn money online the free way.

SEO starts off with on-page optimization. The page that you want to rank high for the specific keyword you want should ideally be centered on that keyword. What do you mean by centered on the keyword? It means the topic of your webpage should be focused on that keyword. Your page title, H1 H2 header tags, image tag, first and last paragraphs should have the keyword in it. The keyword density which is the number of times your keyword appears in the total number of words on the page should ideally be between 3-5% according to SEO experts. All these will contribute to your page ranking higher for the keyword you are gunning for and allow you to earn money online with ease. However, on-page optimization is not the only factor. Another major factor is off-page optimization.

Off-page optimization basically refers to off the page factors that can increase your ranking in the search engines. This is the part where a bit more effort is required to gain the traffic you desire. The most important off-page factor that affects the ranking of your webpage is the number of backlinks and the focus of the pages that are linking to your page. The pages that link to your page should ideally have the same focus as your page and thus are highly relevant to the content of your page. The anchor text used to link to your page should also consist of your keyword and the more of such backlinks you have the higher your page will rank in the search engines. Combining good on-page and off-page optimization is a deadly strategy for getting floods of free traffic that will let you earn money online non-stop.

The above two techniques serve as a starting point to generate hordes of free traffic and let you earn money online successfully. So take action now and bring your site out of the desert and let the world see its beauty. Be sure to read part 2 of the article to find out more powerful free traffic generation methods.