Google searches..

[RJS]

Although I'm involved in telecoms, I'm pretty confused about all the options regarding the search engines - I work mainly on IP hardware / services.

I've signed up for google adwords which so far has cost £20 over the last few days so I'm guessing over the year that could work out fairly expensive?

If I want to get my www site to appear in the search engine at a fairly high position, do I pay for this? If so, what tool would I use? I've registered the site with the google crawler.

I'll have a search around the forums for more info but any advice is appreciated. I'm not selling services online as such.

[KM-Tiger]

Trawl through the SEO, PPC and Online Marketing section of this forum, there are all sorts of gems of information there about both SEO and PPC.

There is a thread (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=139767) running right now about how Google's default 'Broad Match' on Adwords will cost you lots of money to no effect, as perhaps you are beginning to find out.

My view is that if you want good results from PPC, then it's probably worth engaging an expert to set up your campaign.

[MASSEY]

You dont pay for A high ranking position in google or yahoo, i think there are some search engines that you can pay to rank high, but between google and yahoo they controll roughly 75% of searches. so paying would be pointless.

You need to research seo or if you have not got the time pay some one to get your site ranking higher.

[FireFleur]

PPC will generally rank you higher, organic search results are done via SEO and there if you can rank high, you tend to keep it for longer.

PPC though does tend to attract the customers, whereas SEO high organic tends to attract the surfers. A surfer can turn into a customer and vice versa though.

PPC is a bidding system really, and involves a lot of similar stuff to SEO so it might be wise to keep your working or do both at the same time. You are looking to find the phrases people search on that relate to what you are selling in both instances.

A general rule of thumb is launch with PPC and build to SEO, but you have to balance the cost of each approach, there are no guarantees with SEO, and PPC whilst you can rank if you are willing to pay it may turn out that you end up making a loss or minimal profit because you are not converting well enough off PPC.

If you want a good book on both SEO and PPC then The Art of SEO (http://library.poisedsolutions.com/coding/web/the-art-of-seo.xhtml) published by O'Reilly explains them well.

[Andy Walpole]

Maybe a good place to start reading is the actual itself Google SEO Guide - PDF (http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fwebmasters%2Fdoc s%2Fsearch-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf&ei=6-hRS7K1N47u0wSMsoyuCg&usg=AFQjCNEMj8KHxhxQz9cMLoMxMDiLdrAbJw&sig2=m8eJeVhauHSeyGz9RtAQ5A) itself

[big bad bernie]

I would go for PPC to rank higher, at least to begin with, once you have built up a repeat custom you can stop. :)