Asking if it is best to spend more on Pay Per Click (PPC) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a little like asking if you would like cake or ice cream, it normally depends on the circumstances at the time.

Pay Per Click is a great way of getting an instant boost for your company, getting the traffic in through the doors when the site is new so that you can test to see how popular the products or services you are selling are going to be, using relatively mall amounts of just a few hundred pounds you will be able to gage if people are interested in what you are promoting.

Once you know they are interested you can begin your marketing in full force, increasing your Pay Per Click budget and bringing in SEO for the site, Search Engine Optimisation is a longer term strategy than the PPC, but it does have the advantage of continuing to run even when you have stopped paying for it, although if it is stopped prematurely in a competitive market you can see the good positions drop quickly.

You are a little limited with the terms you can promote for with PPC as budget is always a concern, but with SEO you can promote for as many phrases as you like and you will find you are being found for phrases you did not even know were of interest to your visitors.

Rather than using PPC or SEO you should be using a combination of the two so that they complement each other as you move your marketing efforts forward, testing new markets with the PPC and promoting your site into the profitable niches using SEO.

Asking if directories and link exchanges a waste of time for search engine optimisation is quite a big question, not all directories are created equal, DMOZ and Yahoo are two excellent directories and getting into either of them should defiantly help your positions in the search engines, however there are also a large number of directories that are not worth looking at.

Link building for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is more about the quality of your links than the quantity, it is easy to build links back to a website by trading them with other site owners and filling out directory listings, but you need to consider where is the value in this.

The main search engines employ very sophisticated software to calculate the importance of links, the relevance how difficult it was for you to get it. If link does not have a lot of relevance, is of low importance and was easy to get then you get a low value score for that link, if however the link is very relevant, has importance and was difficult to get then that link receives a higher score.

In a perfect world all your links would be of excellent quality and you would get a great SEO score from the search engines, but you do not get this in the real world and so you need to aim for as high a score as you can get but at the same time not get too obsessed with just the quality.

So a link from a relevant directory may be more valuable to you than one from a site that has no relevancy, the same is true for a traded link, so long as not all your links are swapped or traded and you have some quality along side the relevant but lower scoring links that is a good combination.

So as not all directories are created equal so not all links are equal either.

What percentage of my marketing budget should I allocate for online marketing?

This is a question we get asked a lot, how much should I budget for online marketing, and in truth there is no short answer, it is more about using the resources you have in the most effective manor.

One way to test the water and see if you product or service has an online market place and customers who are ready to buy is to run a small Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign, a few hundred pounds is enough to test the water in most cases – you can use any of the main 3 search engines for this as they all have their own PPC sections.

The accounts are simple to set up you can set a budget for the campaign so you know how much it is going to cost you and once you have the ad and keywords in place you should set up conversion tracking to monitor the results.

One of the best things about PPC advertising is that you can change the settings as the campaign runs making tweaks and changes so that you get the most from your advertising.

Once you have established there is a market for what you are offering you can increase your budget and continue using just pay per click or for a longer term strategy you can invest in search engine optimisation (SEO) so your site can be found easily in the search engines.

So the answer to the original question is as much as you can once you have proven to yourself that it works, using the conversion tracking you can see how much each sale has cost you and from there you can work out the profit per £100 you spend on advertising and work out your marketing budget from there.