This is quite a question and one that I believe depends on what market you are in and what you need to achieve from your website, if you have a long term view and you are time rich but cash poor then Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is with out doubt the way to go, you will not see dramatic results over night but in a few months you can get significant extra traffic by ensuring your site is set up properly for the search engines to crawl through and index.

If however you have a good budget and need to see immediate results then Pay Per Click (PPC) may be the best way to go, it will send visitors to your site from day one and with the statistics packages available you will be able to see the ads that resulted in conversions and the ones that were ignored by visitors.

This brings us to another important down side of PPC and that is that Ad blindness is worse than ever Comscore, the marketing research company shows that 16% of Internet users are responsible for 85% of all ad clicks on the web, so the vast majority of visitors from your PPC ads may well have clicked before, this may not be a huge problem if the sales levels are good but it is a disturbing trend.

It is important to have robots txt on your site, this allows you a degree of control over where the search engine spiders visit and what they report and store in their index about your site, this allows you to keep them away from commercially sensitive material or out of member only information if you have a membership area on the site.

Matt Cutts a leading engineer at Google has produced a video that explains the robots txt in more detail and and answes some questions such as

Why is my url showing up in Google when I blocked it in robots.txt? Did you fetch that url?

How do I make that url disappear from Google?

The video can be seen on Matts Blog at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/robots-txt-remove-url/

This is going to be be of interest to any one who needs to know how to sculpt the page rank of their sites to ensure they are getting the most from the search engines.

This is an important part of search engine optimisation and implementing these changes on your site in the appropriate manor can help your rankings in the search engines.

One word of advice, do not go too over board with the robots txt file or you might find you have stopped the search engines indexing some important parts of your website and this will see you fall in the rankings rather than rise.

No we are not talking about the Caffeine that fuels so many offices and comes in cups of lovely warm coffee, instead this is Googles latest change to there algorithm, the program that helps them rank websites on the internet and allows them to pull the correct results from the data base when you search for a term.

Caffeine, which is new technology that improves the indexing infrastructure is according to Matt Cutts of Google due to go live some time after the holidays, I have consulted my American to English dictionary and I believe this means in January.

Matt Cutts comments that this is so web developers can enjoy there holidays with out worrying about what effect the changes will have on their sites, although from the initial testing we have seen a well optomised and site with content that adds value to the internet as a whole will benefit rather than suffer when these changes take full effect.

The changes are designed to give a better experience to the user of Google and so if you have a search engine optimisation plan that is not spammy and that adds value to both your site and the whole of the web then you should be looking forward to the introduction of Caffeine.