Irus Design, Melbourne, Australia

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a technique employed to drive organic or non-paid traffic to your website. Being on top of the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for your target keywords and getting majority of web traffic this way is the ultimate goal and desire of every website owner.

Depending on your target keywords, this can be relatively easy or extremely hard to achieve. Easy or not, this will require quite a bit of time, 6 months or more, and some major effort. The spider is a slow creature.

That’s why it is recommended to employ – in combination with SEO – another technique known as Search Engine Marketing or SEM, which is all about driving paid traffic to your website. The result is instant although not necessarily cheap.

It is a fact – websites thrive with healthy traffic. Traffic stimulates activity, brings visitors and generates revenue. If you have something to say or sell, you will need to have visitors or customers and in some reasonable numbers. Your own promotional activities aside, the vast majority of new users will find you via search engines (Google or not) so, unless you are in a market without competition, you have to make yourself visible and easy to find.

There two major ways to drive traffic via search engines:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) will help with driving organic or non-paid traffic to your website.  To see any serious results will take some time and effort although basic optimisation is quite straight-forward.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) will take care of paid traffic. The result is pretty instant and highly customisable. When set up correctly, you may find that it is not that expensive. Great way to test your chosen keywords before any serious investment into SEO.