Building a website is one thing, but getting people to visit it is another thing entirely. When you’ve built a website, what is your next step? Send an e-mail to all your friends and relatives with a link? Post it on your Myspace? Well, those are a couple of steps that will get you some initial traffic, but is it the type of targeted traffic you’re looking for?

Let’s have a discussion about targeted traffic. Let’s say you sell bananas online, direct from the island of Oahu in Hawaii. You ship them fresh-picked, and they take approximately three days to get to their destinations. We’ll call them “gourmet bananas”. The people you’ll want to attract to your website will find your site how? Ideally, they’ll already be looking for bananas, or information about bananas. At a stretch, they’ll be looking for gourmet or fresh-picked or organic fruit. Possibly even Fruit from Hawaii. People who find you that are looking for this kind of product or information are what we call “targeted traffic”. Conversely, someone looking for ski resorts is probably not going to be wanting to buy bananas - well, not at the moment anyway.

So, how do you get this targeted traffic to your site? Well, first, you need to figure out how your customers are looking for your website, and get in front of them. The majority of websites are found through search engines. Most people use search engines to find information, goods and services online. Now that you know this, you need to get your website in front of these searchers!

There are a couple of ways to get in front of searchers on the search engines. You can either work on your rankings the “natural” way through SEO, or you can tweak keywords and pay for placement on the search engines.

Now, there are pros and cons to each approach.

The first factor is Time.

Natural optimization has the big disadvantage of taking a lot of time to get working correctly. Not only does the site itself need to be optimized, but relationships across the web need to be created and maintained. A level of trust needs to be built with the search engines and with other websites, and a lot of that takes time to accrue.

Paid Search results can typically be on the top of the search engines within a day. That’s a fantastic turnaround!

The second factor is cost.

Natural optimization is typically a lot cheaper than Paid results. With paid results, you’re paying every time someone clicks on a link to your site. The more competitive the keyword, the more each click is going to cost you. Some paid listings will charge you for a number of “impressions” instead of clicks - meaning you get charged every time someone even looks for your keyword phrase and your link is displayed in the listings. This can either work for or against you. If your link is not compelling enough to make someone want to click on it, then you will lose money, but if your link is worded very well, you could potentially save a lot of money using the number of impressions route.

With natural optimization, you do not pay per click. You pay for the time of an SEO person or team of persons to take care of your site’s SEO for you. (If you are the one doing the optimization, consider that you are paying yourself an hourly wage. Don’t sell yourself short and pay yourself minimum wage, when you’re doing your cost calculations! Your time is more valuable than that.)

A third factor is longevity.

While paid advertising is up on the search engines that very day, the cost is that as soon as you decide to stop paying for it, those positions are gone. With natural rankings, your site should increase in rankings over time, and you gain the advantage of people on the internet paying attention to you, and possibly linking to you on their own. What happens is that your site’s popularity will grow almost on its own, even if you stop doing anything to it yourself. However, if you stop updating and stop paying attention to your SEO, your site will start to fall in rankings. But SEO is normally done on a month to month basis, and being a little late with the payment isn’t going to make your site drop off the rankings right away. That is a big advantage over the paid listings.

Yet a fourth factor is Perception.

Customer perceptions. It was once thought that no one ever looked at the paid advertising. Then it was discovered that almost half the searchers out there didn’t even realize there was a difference between paid and natural listings. If you look at Google, it is clearly stated that the ones on top in the grey box are actually paid listings, but not everyone bothers to read that information.

Of the fifty percent of people who can tell the difference between paid and natural listings, about half of them are actually annoyed by the presence of paid listings and will not click on them. This leaves you with still 75% of the market willing to click on paid listings. What about that last quarter of the searchers? Well, you won’t get them with paid listings, but paid listings are still valuable.

What is the best way to get conversions?

Well, there is no best way to get conversions. Every market is its own situation! Someone selling aftermarket tickets to sold out shows might prefer paid listings because their listings change too quickly for natural SEO to catch up. A local gardening store might prefer natural results because their services are going to be unchanging for years to come, and they have a lot of information to put on their site. Still others prefer a mix of Paid search and Natural SEO - paid search has the advantage of letting you test out your keywords and giving you an idea of what to work towards with Natural seo, and also getting your website out in front of searcher’s eyes right away, instead of waiting for natural results to put you there. Brand recognition is a powerful tool on the web and in advertising in general.

Natural rankings and building the reputation of your site are always going to be important, but if you are forced to choose between paid results or natural, make sure you take into account the factors discussed here. You may wish to ask a professional their opinion, but try to find someone who is not biased for paid or natural search to review your situation individually.  Every site is different and cookie cutter solutions don’t do well in today’s competitive markets.