A common question that comes up in meeting with clients is how will they get visitors to their site.  There are two major methods.  You can pay for visitors via pay per click or banner advertisements, or you can be found in organic search results.  Lets go over some basics and pros and cons.

1.  Paid Seach – There are two basic forms of paid search.  One is when you pay a search engine to display a text ad in their search results.  This is commonly refered to as PPC.  Google for example will place your paid ad on the very top of their results or down the right side of their search results.  The Pro is that you will rank on the top pages of your chosen keywords right away and start getting visitors to your site.  The major Con is that you have to pay, and sometimes even though it may be $0.25 per click those clicks add up.  Also once you stop paying your ads are not shown, and you are no longer visible on the results page.

2. Organic Search – This is when someone types in a keyword looking for information and your site comes up in the “natural” rankings for FREE.  An example would be the results that are in the middle or left of googles search results page.  A common technique used to get your site in those results is called SEO or Search Engine Optimization.  This is when a designer or another company makes your site more relevant to others so that you show up in front of simular sites to yours.  This is a very difficult task especially when your are in a very compeditive market.  When designing sites we use basic SEO tactics to get your site ranking well with in a few weeks.  The major Pro is that you do not have to pay per click.  The biggest Con is that it may take weeks or even months to build up your site in Organice Results and to get Google and other search engines to deam your site more important that others.