General statistics have shown over the past few years that 70% of the search engine visitors will click on the Organic Listings versus 30% of visitors that will click on the sponsored listings. Most people I’ve dealt with have told me that they feel that the organic listings are “unbiased” listings and therefore are more relevant. The truth is that companies are investing money to optimize their web sites and develop strategies to make sure their listings are at the top of the organic listings for their search words and phrases.

While there are benefits to both search engine strategies, one requires a payment every time someone clicks on the link to your site while the other doesn’t require a fee for each click, but could require monthly fees to get your site ranked at the top and keep it there.

Other Things to Consider

Pay Per Click advertising simply requires setting up accounts with Yahoo and Google and creating ads and setting bids for your keywords and phrases. It takes a minimal amount of time and your ads could be online within as little as an hour. The organic listings on the other hand take quite a while to integrate (Google can take up to 6 months to get a real hold on the placement) and you need to understand much more about the algorithmic methods of the search engines so you can change your site and make the engines take notice.

The following is a breakdown as to how the engines rank web sites organically and what you need to do to optimize your site to get it ranked higher in the engines.