Pay Per Click vs. Search Engine Optimization
In this post, I will be comparing the relative benefits of advertising your website, or affiliate link using pay per click advertising, or promoting it free by using SEO, and getting into organic search results.
A well rounded promotional campaign may use both of these methods effectively, but only if the postitives outweigh the negatives.
To start with, you cannot directly advertise affiliate links on Google Adwords anymore, as they have recently changed their policy, permanently suspending thousands of accounts, so bare that in mind.
The Benefits of pay per Click Advertising
If you know what you are doing, and are advertising a high quality domain which you own, you can get a lot of traffic through pay per click advertising, whether on Google Adwords, or another advertising company like Facebook Ads.
By getting the targeting details right, you can buy your way to thousands of views a day, hopefully making you a good profit if the clicks turn into sales.
You have to be making a good amount of money when someone buys your product, or signs up to your site, or otherwise it would be a waste of time.
The drawbacks of using pay per click advertising is you need a lot of money to do split testing on different campaigns, and you may end up losing a lot of money before you figure out what works.
The Benefits of SEO
The obvious benefits of SEO is you get your pages on the first page of the organic search results of Google for free, if you know what you’re doing. Instead of adding thousands of different keyword phrases, you have to write thousands of articles with those titles, and optimize them well so they get found.
Articles are great for making back links, and for driving traffic to your site, and it is not about quantity, but quality that will affect your Google rating.
You can no longer just spin articles so they’re slightly different, and submit to dozens of low quality article directories. One of the main changes in the Google algorithm is the increased importance of the "bounce rate".
This is used to determine the quality of the page based on the amount of time someone spends reading it, whether they continue further into the site, and whether or not they click on an ad.
I will explain a lot more about SEO in my other posts, but in my opinion, it kicks ass over pay per click advertising, because you get paid to get views and make back links, instead of paying for something which might not even work.