A lot of people ask me about the merits of buying clicks onsearch engines with AdWords, vs. getting free visitors withwhat's called "search engine optimization" - loading up your webpages with strategic keywords so you can get ranked #10 or#3 or #1 on Google's free search.
Well at first glance free is certainly better than paid, butthere are some big IF's that you need to consider first!
Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe tenwords and phrases - not hundreds - so you should choosevery, very carefully. But the most important thing is choosing the RIGHTwords and phrases to optimize for. Now here's the kicker: If you don't use a pay per click strategy to determine whichwords and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you willalmost always choose the wrong keywords. The words youinitially think you want are almost always different than the onesthat actually work - believe me, I've made that mistake manytimes. Considering it takes 30 days to several months to seeresults when you're playing the search engine optimizationgame, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords. When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you'llsee that there are almost always a few really productive wordsand phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, insteadof 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people arenot optimizing their websites for those same keywords either.
Well just like pay per click, search engine phrases havevarying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1ranking for the phrase "Digital Camera" it's going to bea LOT harder than getting a #1 ranking for "Kodak DX6340"which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will bemuch more targeted, too. When you do search engineoptimization, you must pick battles you can win.
So here's the lesson. Determine which keywords are productive, THEN dosearch engine optimization based on what really works.Then you'll get all kinds of free traffic and even moreincome from your website:
