PPC can be very expensive. While SEO is a slower process, PPC advertising allows you to receive instant traffic. So the trick here is to get the maximum return or your investment of time and money.

PPC: Google Adwords is the biggest and best-known service for placing ads for your webpage. When you use Adwords you will have a set of statistics to review to check the efficacy of their placement. While using a service such as Google you will save all the time of searching for relatively appropriate and high-value placements for your ads. You will also save time negotiating ad prices, types (text or banner), duration or price per click - which is a lot of work and can be very time consuming.

PPC: If you do not get good results from Google within one month you will, and should, question the value of their system for your webpage. Google states it has controlled fraudulent clickthroughs - but how much so? You must monitor your campaign carefully to make sure you don't waste money. If you have a good understanding of the laws of natural statistics you can set up some tests.

PPC: If you know nothing about statisitics you may want someone to consult with you on sample sizes, variables, etc. But to keep it simple just ask this question: How much money did I spend versus how much did I make from the ads. I recommend that your monthly expenditure be kept low and that you monitor it for 3-6 months. If you make no other changes, don't expect that your results will vary a great degree after that time.

SEO is a different process - requiring more work and patience than PPC, but requiring no cash outlay. Consideration of SEO begins from day one - when you purchase a domain name, or register your URL.

SEO must be considered throughout the design of your website because search engine spiders must be able to read all of your strategic use of tags, titles, content of body text, placement of keywords, etc.

SEO demands a lot of content that is related to your keywords. And these articles and lengthy descriptions of products and services must be added to and updated. These are hardly visitor-friendly, but search engines still rely on this now archaic system.

SEO also demands LINKS. These links must be TO your website FROM other websites sharing this content and link approach to SEO. This linking "frenzy" has been refined to a "minuet" and is scrutinized as an art form in the spiders' algorithms. But you will spend a lot of time and effort on getting inbound links from spider-friendly websites because these websites are very jealous of their spider relationships.

SEO is slow in its reaction to quality of content - partly because it has little regard for conciseness or content based on graphics. RSS feeds are read by spiders as a positive - again based on responses to text - how it evaluates respondents is questionable however. But the supposition by SEO algorithms designers is that people who like your site will just link to it.

SEO: Search engines is probably penalizing the buying of incoming links. How a purchased link is detected probably involves sporadic use of forms of entrapment, otherwise the search engines have no data.

Considering these two methods you may even want to use a combination of PPC and SEO, especially in the early days of the website's preparation for the much longer process of SEO preparation.

At this time, for most new websites, considering the SEO's slow-moving system, I would begin with PPC - possibly Google's approach. Then I would add visitor-friendly content (devoid of redundancy and of bulk - even if the spiders like it).

I would add feeds in such a way as to attract a visitor to the website. Then, incrementally add your own system of banner exchanges with like minded websites to drive traffic. This is a relatively low-cost approach that demands moderate cash outlays and moderate work.

You can then determine how much of each - money or work, PPC or SEO - that you want to invest to get traffic.