The basic idea is that certain search words are relevant to your business, and when prospective customers enter these words into search engines, a link to your business will appear on the search results page.

The more you pay for a particular word or phrase, the better the chance you have of appearing on page one of someone’s search results. Also, whenever you do appear there, if someone (the searcher) clicks on your link, Google (or whomever you purchased the pay-per-click service from) will charge you for it (thus “pay-per-click).

You pay for each time someone clicks through to your page. If you notice on the Google search results page, several links appear at the top and side of the page, these are the pay-per-click businesses; they have paid Google to appear on page one.

The only drawback to this particular form of advertising is that you essentially have no control over the quality of the click-throughs (those prospects who click on the Google AdWords links in the Google search results). You could have a devious competitor who hires a computer programmer to design a program that would do searches automatically on Google each day and click-through to your site. You would then be charged for all of these click-throughs and they would all be worthless to your business. As a result, your competitor has used a devious tactic to disrupt your business. But when you think about this possibility, you will eventually realize that competitors can do this in other ways as well (programs that tie up your phone lines), so the vulnerability is not unique to AdWords.

There are two major techniques in use today that are used for Internet marketing. These are Natural SEO and the other one is Pay per click advertising.

Let’s take a look at what these concepts are before we move any further.

Pay per click advertising: Pay per click advertising is a technique that works by taking a specified sum of money for listing your advertisement on any of the major or minor search engines. As a net savvy techno freak you would have seen such sponsored links when you would have performed searches on Google.

These sponsored links usually appear at the top, bottom or, as in the case of Google, the right hand side of the search engine results page. These sponsored links are referred to by many monikers. Some of the more popular ones are Paid Listings, Sponsored Listings, or Featured Listings.

When you sign up for a pay per click program the Pay per click search engines require that you pay a pre specified amount to have your advertisement listed on the major search engines. You would also be required to bid on keywords that are related to your business. For example, if you are a T-shirt manufacturer then it would be in your favor to have your link displayed whenever someone searches for shirts or even apparel or maybe even casual wear.

Once you have finalized your bid and the deal is done you don’t need to pay any money upfront. The best part about pay per click advertising is that the bid amount is to be paid by the advertiser whenever a visitor clicks on the advertisement and no money needs to be paid up front. Hence, this is also known as a “cost per click” program.

The terms Pay per click and cost per click are oftentimes used interchangeably to describe Pay per Click web advertising. Although Pay per click refers to the payment method and Cost per click refers to the cost factor involved in each payment.

Natural SEO: Natural Search engine optimization is defined as the process of redirecting traffic volumes to a specific website through a search engine like Google by using natural or organic or algorithmic techniques. More often than not what happens is that the faster or earlier a site is displayed in the search results the more the higher it will be ranked thereby increasing greatly the probability of a searcher visiting that site.

Search Engine Optimization not only makes use of keywords, although that is the most popular method of conducting Search engine optimization processes, it can also carry out different kinds of searches including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical searches.

As a marketing strategy utilized primarily for increasing a site’s ranking, Search Engine Optimization will take into account how search algorithms work and what exactly do people search for.

Search Engine Optimization efforts would involve a number of things such as a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, in addition to fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a given site.

Trying to Compare Natural SEO and Pay per click advertising is like trying to compare your right hand and your left hand and asking which one is better? Each has its own importance and is usually advisable to use a combination of the two techniques for optimum results.

The major advantage that Pay per click advertising offers is that it gives faster results as compared to the Natural search engine optimization techniques.

Ideally a combination of both works best. Happy marketing.