Paid Search: Yes or No?

Did you know that 90% of Google's huge revenue (they just gave all 23,000 of their employees a $1000 bonus AND a 10% raise so they are clearly doing ok) comes from Google Adwords? Clearly plenty of businesses are investing in paid search advertising.When we talk about search engine results, we are talking about two distinctly different things: organic vs. paid search efforts. Organic happens because you optimized your site to rank high in searches and someone did a Google search and found you. Paid is because you bought ad space to the side of those searches. Both are important (let's not even talk about pay-per-click advertising on sites like Facebook. That's a whole other topic!) and both require tinkering for improvements.For organic searches, to rank more highly on Google, Yahoo and Bing (primarily), your website will need to be "optimized". I've written about this before but suffice to say, you will want meta tags that drive traffic to your site. You can't always know what these are without changing them from time to time and watching Google Analytics to determine if your organic search traffic has changed. Google keyword search will help you determine some of these.A blog that has additional content can be helpful as well because it expands the number of search terms that Google can find from a traditional website. Wordpress developed blogs draw more traffic than most blog software/sites so consider it can be a better choice.Pay-per-click paid searches on Google can be confusing. Start small with Google pay-per-click. You have a tiny little window of words so write several different ads. Start with one, watch your results, monitor weekly and then try a new ad. Track results. Larger budgets for ads don't always produce results so you will want to monitor and switch that up as well until you have your budget and your ads performing at their peak.Finally, don't let anyone tell you definitively that they can perfectly optimize your site. They can't. Most of what a search engine specialist can do, you can do as well-for free-with similar results. by Steven Schlagel