So you’ve decided to start an online business. There are many ways to do this and i’m sure you’ve researched the very idea thoroughly. But there is an area where most new business fall down. Visibility. If your business is online it has to be easily found. Most people use search engines like Google to find products, services and companies. You can either pay to have your site appear at the top of Google or tried to break into the first page of Google.

Option 1 is expensive and tailored accordingly to your budget. Option 2 takes time or the experience of seo consultants. Lets look at option 1. Google run an advertising program called Adsense. I’m sure you’ve seen the “sponsored ads” at the top of any search query you input into Google. These ads are placed on top of the “natural” or also as they are known the “organic” search engine listings. Advertisers pay a premium each time a browser click on one of the ads. You can see the ads displayed on the top and also on the right hand side of the natural listings.

The bonus with these ads is that you can instantly have your ad shown on the Number 1 spot of Google for any keyword or keyphrase you want. You can even input the search terms you are after into Google Adwords and it will tell you roughly how many searches a keyword or key phrase gets each month. You can sign up to and input your credit card details in, which is how you are billed for using the service. The No 1 listed website in the sponsored search results is the company paying the most per click. Which is termed “cost per click”.

The downside of this is that advertisers are fiercely bidding for many keyword phrases and this drives the price up. You can set a daily limit and once this is reached no more of your ads will display. Another downside is the ads on the right hand side do not get as much click throughs as the ads on top of the natural listings. So if you want more click throughs you need to be willing to pay the premium.

Another downside is all the sponsored search results get lower click through rates than the natural organic listings. There is a certain “Adwords blindness” adopted by internet users. They are so much used to seeing ads that they simply ignore them. Some stats have shown that the No 1 listed sponsored search advert gets a meagre 1-3% of all click throughs on a search results page.

Lets go all the way back to Option 1. The process of ranking your site high in the natural organic search listings employs a technique known as search engine optimization. The No 1 listed site here get about 40-45% of all page click throughs. That totally annihilates the No1 spot that a sponsored search result gets.

The downside with seo is that it can take a considerable length of time. Sometimes years. Most sites these days are employing seo consultants or have a seo department in house. Many companies use Google Adwords to get some immediate traffic and results, and work on their seo strategy weekly. With some markets you can get descent ranking results in 3 months. It just depends on the competitiveness of the market.

Author Bio: For more info on search engine optimization and seo consultants log onto our website: http://seo-city.co.uk

Category: Internet
Keywords: seo, search engine optimization, search engine optimisatio, seo strategies, seo techniques, links