The battle rages on.  Is PPC (pay per click) better or is natural  SEO (search engine optimization) better for your site?  Which of these methods of getting traffic will have a better conversion rate for you?  If you are involved in affiliate marketing in anyway you probably are always hungry for more traffic to your site.

The Battle to Get Web Traffic

With tens of thousand of websites being built and entering into the web’s atmosphere everyday the competition is more fierce than it has ever been.  And Google’s rules keep changing and adapting to the times to make sure only the best websites rise to the top.  But this is actually a good thing.  A good thing, that is, if you are only using white hat techniques and are working on a website that is built for the long hall.

So what is the difference between SEO and PPC?

To put it simply, PPC is when you pay for every click that comes through to your website.  The most common form of PPC is with Google Adwords, where you bid on an amount you are willing to pay for a specific keyword and if you bid the highest your website advertisement will show in the search results at the top.  SEO is when you try to build your site in such a way that you rank high in the natural search engine results and get this traffic for free.

So which is better?  PPC or SEO?

Well first, let’s look at some of the Pros of both:

The Pros of PPC:

• Targeted Traffic
• Instant Traffic
• Very Fast to Set Up and Rank High
• Easy to Get Exposure to Your Site
• Complete Control Over How Your Add Looks
• Easy to Track Which KeyWords Are Bringing the Sales

The Pros of SEO

• Targetted Traffic
• Free Traffic
• People can find you with keywords you never aimed for
• Higher ROI (return on investment), yup, it’s been proven
• Better for the Long run
• Better Visiblity (you can be found on all search engines)

So there you see some reasons to use Pay Per Click and Search Engine Optimization, and perhaps you can tell which one I prefer…. Yup, I love SEO.  Some people make the mistake of starting out with PPC and guess what, I was one of those people.  I spent a fortune getting traffic to my site before I even had a firm grasp on what SEO was.

I highly recommend to learn everything you can about SEO first and THEN add PPC to your campaigns and you will see an exponential increase in your sales.  After all, just because I favor SEO more than PPC does not mean you can’t use both.  But you will always have a higher conversion rate with natural search engine results, because that’s where the buyers are.  More internet users are savvy to how the whole Google and Yahoo ads work and stay away from them as they can appear spammy.

How can you improve your websites SEO?

Here are some helpful hints in getting more organic traffic.

On site SEO

• Make sure your page titles and H1, H2 etc.. tags and descriptions on every page are unique and target those keywords you CAN rank for.
• Use image alt tags with your keywords as well.
• Target no more than 3 main keyword phrases per page
• Use XML sitemap on site.
• Interlink the pages of your website naturally
• Use “nofollow” links to pages you don’t need to rank for (privacy policy.. etc..)
• Use Your targeted keywords in the beginning of your text and at the end. Aim for a 3-6% keyword density.  Useful tool at keyworddensity.com.
• Design your site for humans so they do not bounce right away which can hurt you in the SERPs.

Off Site SEO

Offsite SEO is all about getting those ever precious backlinks.

• Build backlinks to your site from high PR websites
• Use different anchor texts with your links and mix it up a little so as not to make Google or other SE’s suspicious.
• Build backlinks from a variety of sources i.e. forums, articles, blog comments, related websites, and banners.
• If it is a new website than build the backlinks slowly.  Remember, Google is looking for a natural flow of backlinks so don’t try to build 1,000 in one day.
• Try some reciprocal links but not too much.  You can trade links with a site but I don’t really recommend it as it can raise a red flag.
• Make amazing content!  If your website is just plain awesome then people are going to want to link to it themselves and this is the very BEST way to get backlinks!

I know I could go on all day on this topic, so leave a comment below if you feel I left something out.  What have you done that has really helped your site get more traffic?

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