Many people often try to decide which is better, paying for clicks with Adwords, or optimizing a site to get free search engine traffic.

My answer is always the same – if you can profitably generate website traffic with both, it’s best to do both to generate maximum returns.

Remember though, paid search engines and free search engines are entirely different animals.

Let’s look a little deeper so you understand the pros and cons of Search Engine Optimisation for the ?free? search engines (SEO) and Pay-Per-Click optimisation on paid search engines (PPC).

SEO versus PPC

PPC (paying for clicks) is good because-

1. It’s a very fast way to generate targeted traffic – you can literally generate visitors to your website within 10 minutes. SEO takes much longer to see results.

2. You can easily decide where to send each visitor (e.g. if a visitor searches on ‘blue widgets’, you can direct them to your ‘blue widgets’ product page.) With SEO, the search engines decide for you.

3 You can test different offers, copy, and headlines in order to see which combination works best.

4 You can drive traffic for a variety of different keywords, but with SEO you’re better off targeting just a few keywords.

5. Your website doesn’t have to be ’search engine friendly’ for PPC to work. (Websites built with ‘Flash’ are notoriously UN-friendly to search engines, but they don’t necessarily affect PPC traffic.)

6. You’re optimizing for conversion results, not the ranking formula for a particular search engine.

7. In order to get the best ROI, you can experiment by changing your page position.

8. The changes to the rules of PPC search engines are usually less often and less significant to the changes that take place with the SEO rules.

SEO (free traffic) is good because-

1. It costs nothing-its absolutely free.

2. You will be able to generate free traffic for terms that would be too costly to bid on using PPC.

3. The long-term Return On Investment is often better than Pay Per Click. It’s slower at first, and the risk is higher if you don’t know what you?re doing, but it’s cheaper in the long term.

4. Once you achieve good rankings, it’s pretty easy to maintain the rankings with very little additional effort.

5. You can build incredible momentum and dominate your market while your competitors bleed themselves dry trying to compete with you on PPC search engines as they pay for every click.

Conclusion: SEO and PPC both have their place in any online lead generation strategy for your business website.

But the Search Engine Optimization field is riddled with mis-information and half-truths that can waste your time, blow your budget and frustrate the heck out of you, all at the same time.

About the author: Mr David B. Ascot is revealing his sales lead generation tips to ensure your company profits through online lead generation.