3. Need Immediate Results A basic Pay Per Click campaign on Overture or Google can be up and running and driving visitors to your web site in a matter of hours. Significant improvement in organic rankings may take several months to achieve. If you require immediate results Pay Per-Click advertising will need to be your top priority.

4. Guaranteed Top Placement No-one can guarantee consistent, top organic listings for high volume key phrases in a competitive market sector. Search engines change their algorithms (indexing criteria) regularly and no one can control how or when sites are indexed, except individual search engine itself. If you absolutely must guarantee consistent top placement on high-volume keywords in a competitive market sector, you will need to rely heavily on Pay Per Click advertising and have sufficient budget to fund it. Investigate current bid rates, can you afford top placement on highest-volume words? If not, expand your keyword list beyond most obvious and popular key phrases and advertise across a larger number of less popular, more specific and cost-effective phrases. Remember that most searchers enter two or three words to form a key phrase rather than a single word.

For a complete guide to setting up and managing your Pay Per Click campaign, download our guide: “Maximising Your Pay Per Click Campaign” read an excerpt here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_5.html

Ultimately, focus on keywords that work best and achieve best conversion rates and highest return on investment (ROI). For more detailed advice on how to measure your conversions and ROI, download our guide: “Measuring Success”, read an excerpt here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_6.html

5. A Need To Change Advert Content or Timing If you need to frequently change content of your adverts, for example to promote particular products or to make seasonal offers, or if you want to be able to turn your advertising on and off, you will need to rely on control and flexibility offered by Pay Per Click advertising.

6 Ad-Adverse Audience More Internet savvy search engine users recognise information that is displayed as a purchased advert and this limits its credibility. In this case integrity associated with a high natural ranking is invaluable. If your target market is likely to be Internet wise (IT professionals, students, etc), optimisation should be your main focus.

The above guidelines will help you assess relative priority of optimisation and Pay Per Click advertising, but how should you implement each method? Simultaneously or one at a time?

Generally speaking I would recommend that you start Pay Per Click campaign slightly before optimisation of your web site. The immediacy of a Pay Per Click campaign will bring you visitors in short term, and more importantly it will also allow you to measure what is (and is not) working on your web site; are landing pages for your adverts converting your visitors, are you targeting most effective keywords, etc.

Armed with results of this testing you can optimise your web site effectively and avoid costly delays that occur while waiting for search engines to re-crawl newly optimised pages. Only when you are completely happy that your web site is best it can be should you submit it to search engines.

When these organic listings start to bring visitors to your web site, you can re-evaluate you Pay Per Click spend. It may be that your ROI on these adverts is acceptable and you continue as is, or you may wish to reduce your advertising spend. A quick calculation on your conversion rates should give you answer. For more information see our guide: “Measuring Success”, read an excerpt here: http://www.enable-uk.co.uk/html/book_6.html

Today, most marketers accept that web site optimisation for organic listings and Pay Per Click advertising is not an either/or proposition. For a well-rounded and effective search marketing campaign that reaches greatest number of searchers, marketers should blend both natural and paid listings, capitalising on their complementary strengths and weaknesses.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM) - The amount an advertiser pays for one thousand advertisement impressions, regardless of consumer's subsequent actions.

Delisting - The removal of a listing as a result of inaction or poor performance.

GeoTargetting - An advertisement targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location.

Impressions - The number of times an advertisement is viewed by web surfers.

Keywords - Search terms or phrases that are related to an advertisement or ad copy.

Landing Page - The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.

Linking Text - The text that is contained within a link.

Pay Per Click (PPC) - Advertising model in which advertisers pay for click-throughs to their website. Ads are served based on keywords or themes.

Rank - How well a particular web page or web site is listed in a search engine or advertising results.

Return On Investment (ROI) - The percentage of profit that results in a marketing or advertising campaign. Naturally, advertisers want amount of money made to exceed money spent.

Understanding above terminology will help marketers navigate pay-per-click advertising model, which has emerged on Internet and become one of leading advertising models in online world.