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.