Most website or blog owners know that in order for your site to be profitable you must have traffic visiting your website. It is through this visiting traffic that your well thought out website has the ability to earn you a substantial income through the means of affiliate marketing or even running ads on your site. However, if traffic is not being generated and online viewers are not finding your site then any additional means of income will not be beneficial to your business. In fact, it will be greatly difficult for your site to make any money at all, so it is imperative your website attracts visitors. Most online businesses use two main ways to generate traffic for their sites. These are paid advertising and SEO (search engine optimization). Each of these methods has its own set of advantages. Which one is the right method to help your site is completely up to your own personal preferences, but before deciding you need to know what each of these methods entails.
Paid advertising, also sometimes referred to as Search Engine Marketing (SEM), is where companies or marketers rent or pay for space on search engines. Their ads will generally appear towards the top of search engines so they are more visible to potential customers and clients. SEM traffic is targeted. People use search engines to learn something new or find a solution to a problem they are having. This makes Search Engine Marketing very valuable in bringing what your website has to offer to the person searching for a particular solution or bit of information. The most popular ad agency for this method is Google Adwords.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO for short, operates differently than paid advertising. Where paid advertising is more obvious on the internet, Search Engine Optimization is not as obvious as it works stealthily behind the scenes of search engines to improve a website’s traffic and ranking on search engines such as Google. SEO works by using keywords, strategic search phrases and meta tags to tell search engines that your website is worth visiting resulting in an increase in site traffic. There are two different types of SEO mainstays. Those are on-sight and off-sight. On-sight basically refers to rules you set on your own website such as optimized titles, product or informational descriptions and well-formatted URLs. Off-sight is the process of getting votes from other websites and earning trust for your site by search engines. These votes are simply links coming from other websites to yours, and this act is also known as link sharing. You can also hire a professional company (e.g. SEO Sydney) to handle your SEO for your.
Where both of these methods clearly have their differences such as Search Engine Optimization or being completely free of charge other than you needing to do some creative wording or Search Engine Marketing where you buy your search engine position, both have one common goal. This goal is to make your website appear more visible to potential clients and readers. This would result in more traffic thus make your online business more money.
