Unless you are targeting a set of keywords that nobody dominates (which probably means there are very few searches for those keywords), the process of getting organic (free) traffic to your website is a long one and a lot of homework is necessary to ensure you get it right and don’t go down the wrong road, optimising keywords that bring your website very little traffic, or a lot of the wrong kind of traffic.

You can shortcut the process of getting traffic and at the same time get very good intelligence on the best keywords to target with PPC (pay per click) advertising. Running a PPC campaign at the start of your SEO campaign will cost a little more, but you will start to get inquiries immediately and more importantly, you will know the keywords which are going to be most productive for your business.

Those of us running PPC campaigns are usually quite mystified at the difference between keyword traffic estimated by Google’s own suggestion tool and the reality once a campaign starts. Equally as inconclusive are the results given by different keyword research tools like Wordtracker – they are often completely opposed – and all are apparently using the same logs – those of the search engines themselves.

While I’m not trying to dismiss keyword research tools altogether, they are still an important part of the process, they only provide a best guess – Pay per click campaigns provide hard facts.

A properly run pay per click campaign will benefit you in the following ways:

1. It will bring you leads in a very short time frame.
2. It will tell you which keywords are actually getting the most searches – no guesswork.
3. More importantly, it will tell you which keywords are bringing inquiries (valuable leads as opposed to tyre kickers)It will tell you the kind of message the market responds best to – (so you can develop your other advertising and even your website around that)
4. It will give you a database of interested people that you can market back to.

By basing your longer term SEO campaign on the hard facts you get from a Pay Per Click campaign and not on best guesses you get from research tools, you will give yourself the best possible chance of dominating the most valuable keywords for your business – ensuring your online success.

This is one of the most common questions asked, but it is probably as vague as asking “what is the best kind of horse?” The answer is of course, it depends what you want to do with it.

There are a multitude of different systems available now and all have some good points and some areas that they are less than perfect in, but often, despite having so many systems available that can just be modified, we have to build the website from scratch.

This is because a website which is purpose-built is built to do only the functionality required and so it runs faster, compared to an off-the-shelf system that has a multitude of features that you don’t want and some you have to modify to use.

But often an off-the-shelf solution is best. This website for instance is a Wordpress blog. It literally took 30 minutes to set up and another hour to do the custom logo on the header and replace the standard file. It uses a standard template called ‘iNove’ which can be easily loaded from the back end – and it is literally the best solution for my requirements:

I want a blogging engine I can post information on and get it out to the online community. I want something which is SEO friendly (and Wordpress has some good SEO plugins), has a Google site map and is easy to customise for my basic requirements.

Now if I wanted to sell a whole lot of products, or have an integrated forum, or have a membership area or have a back end where I could see subscribers and communicate with them, it would be a different story. I could probably find enough plug ins and modify them with code and front end script and do pretty well anything, but the basic system was not designed for that and it would not be the best solution.

Something like Business Catalyst (Good Barry) might be better. If I wanted to catalog thousands of products and have them appear in different ways in different parts of the site, I might be better to use MySource Matrix. If I wanted a sophisticated shopping cart with all the features: upsell, shipping options etc. and just a few static pages, then I would probably be better to use a shopping cart engine like X-cart and so on.

You don’t put a Thoroughbred in the gym to strengthen it so it can pull carts and you don’t try and make a Clydesdale run faster to put it on the racetrack – they could never be as good as the horse that is bred for the job.