Should your website lie within a very competitive area of market, you may find that contracting a professional SEO who will attend to your site requirements full time, would be a wise decision. Sponsored Listings

With sponsored listings, Google makes use of its own Pay-For-Performance program called Adwords. MSN and Yahoo! both make use of Overture (which is owned by Yahoo!) for their Paid listings. In both programs you only pay when people click on your ad, which makes this type of advertising extremely cost effective.

Account holders are not able to optimize their adverts such as SEOs would optimize their websites to achieve higher ranking. The order of results is displayed according to highest bid for that particular keyword.

According to a few users views on two different experiences, with Yahoo! advertisers often pay less per click than with Google. However Google delivers more traffic and often times converts better than Yahoo!’s delivered clicks.

Natural or Paid Search – which is right for your website

There is no wrong or right way to market your website. As was once said “Any publicity is good publicity.” And it remains to ring true in land of search marketing where it is “be seen or face chance of disappearing below your competitors”.

Each website’s marketing strategy is unique. It all depends on what your desired results and expected deliverable time frames are at end of day.

Results achieved from optimising your website for natural listings take longer to come into effect, but deliver a long term solution to your traffic.

Results achieved for sponsored listings are of immediate effect; however deliver a short term solution to your traffic and could be rather costly depending on competitiveness of your market.

"PPC is one of fastest ways to drive large, predictable amounts of extremely targeted visitors to your Web site," says Jean Lam in WebProNews. "There is a huge difference between getting normal top five rankings in major search engines and getting a top five ranking in pay-per-click listings."

A combination of two strategies is recommended to achieve optimum results. Build a good content relevant site, ie optimized for both search engines and visitors, and launch a PPC campaign alongside. In this way while search engines juggle relevance in their indices PPC campaign will deliver traffic to your site fast and get your brand noticed.

Brand awareness sparks interest which sparks traffic which leads to conversions and ultimately ROI.

The other benefit of these toolbars is that they track sites that you visit. Not in an intrusive way and totally anonymously. What this means is that if you visit your own site regularly just by having toolbars installed you will boost its rankings. ;-)

I recommend you install both these tools. They install across top of Internet Explorer underneath address bar. It only takes a minute or two for installation and its done without any need to download software. Once installed you can always right click them and close them if they get in way. Very handy little things.

To check a sites link popularity try this handy online tool

10: Search Engines and Submissions. To round off this article and tie things up I'm going to say a little bit about which search engines to submit to and why, how to go about it and why you need not pay anything to get into major SE's.

Google is king of search engines producing most accurate and relevant results for any search and up until recently it 'crawled/spidered' web once every six weeks or so, doing what was called 'Google dance'. So called because as their database was updated ranking of sites could shift dramatically for a few days before settling back down. This has now stopped as of Q2 2003.

Google now crawls constantly and there is no longer any major shift in listings. Entry into Google is free and can be very quick, probably quickest outside paid listing. A site should appear in Google within six weeks of submitting URL. This is still a long time to wait, but it works out quite well if you use next little tactic I'll explain after next two paragraphs.

Relationships between SE's have changed dramatically yet again over last 12 months.

(For a very useful and informative illustration of current Major SE relationships take a look at this chart. If your new to SE optimising you'll probably find this a real eye opener)

Google has been supplying search results for AOL and Yahoo amongst others. Yahoo has bought out major SE Overture for millions of dollars and a few months later bought out another less well known but significant SE, inktomi, who actually supply listings to MSN, Overture, HotBot, BBC, About.com again for millions of dollars.

Yahoo is now basically consolidating these engines and will I'm sure restructure its own sites search algorithms to bring these engines online. Yahoo currently charges for a listing in its directory $299 last time I checked. But since they brought their new search engine seperate from their directory there's no need to pay to enter yahoo.

By far fastest and most cutting edge way to get your site crawled by search engines is to use a tactic called Blog and Ping. This will call main search engine spiders over to your site when you choose and get you indexed within days. Keep this up and your whole site, all its pages, will be indexed before you know it. Click on link above for more info from my friend Rick Butts.

(One word of warning stay away from 'Submit your site to 1500 search engine' style links you find all over web these days, you'll just end up with loads of spam emails. The majority of SE traffic comes from top six SE's.)

Hand submission or automated software? Well neither really these days. You can have your home page indexed simply by finding another site to exchange links with. Google actually states that they prefer to find sites by crawling web rather than through their submission service. This will work much faster than submission service.

If you do decide to submit to search engines then ordinarily I would recommend submitting by hand one at a time. I've done this for last five years. Simply because software available to submit a site wasn't up to job. But finally there is a piece of software that is up to job and more than that it helps with choice of keywords, checks optimisation of your site pages, checks for broken links, reveals your link popularity, tracks and reports visitors to your

site and will report on your position in all major engines for your chosen keywords.

In past there was a chance that a site could be blacklisted or not even listed if it was submitted by software. This software gets around this problem by simulating a browser whenever it deals with search engines, be it submitting your site or reporting on its ranking.

I now use this for all my own and client sites. Finally I can save time I used to spend on submitting by hand. You can download a free trial from www.webceo.com. If you would still prefer to go down hand submission route - Here's a page with links to submission pages of around 30 search engines.

Conclusion I hope you enjoyed reading what has turned out to be a rather long article and found something new and useful within it.

It goes without saying that you should apply above techniques to individual pages of your site. Start with important and most relevant content based pages and work backwards from there. Finally one more online tool to help you check your site for errors.

How-to-make-money-online.info is a site focused on Making Money Online listing the many and varied ways of making money online.