Decisions, decisions,
Organic vs Pay-Per-Click SE Positioning
...for best results, layer and mix. – by Ginette Degner

In light of the current consolidations of search engines I'm frequently being asked if the traffic coming from "organic" SE positioning makes the effort worth it to optimize a site for high ranking. After all, buying top placement with pay-per-click services is easier even if it is more expensive.

Organic positioning – being what people-in-the-SEO-trade are calling pages that rank well based on their content, popularity, and reputation – is earned placement aside from paying a fee. Of course, the flip side of the coin is pay-per-click portals (and their many partner sites) that award top placements to the highest bidders for a selected keyword.

The question I am hearing is, why bother to attempt ranking high with organic positioning when it's so straight-forward to just buy the placement? Answer: because the best sales results are being enjoyed by online companies who do both. Here's the reasoning.

Organic positioning with engines like Google, AltaVista, Inktomi, All the Web, Teoma and even DMOZ add up to significant traffic counts. Want proof? ...chances are you'll need look no further than your log files to see who is actually sending you traffic. In most cases, that information alone will convince you of the value of organic positioning.

From our own experience I can share stats for an organically positioned site we manage. Site logs for a single day, August 27th, revealed the following traffic count from 18 different sources...

212 - MSN	10 - AOLSearch	2 - HotBot
163 - Google	10 - DogPile	2 - WebCrawler
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