A project on Sportsink.com has demonstrated the benefits of search engine optimisation (SEO) over pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, according to the firm that launched it.

US-based SEO firm Pilot Fish has worked with Sports Reporting Technologies to optimise the high school sport site, which launched in August last year.

During a month in which Sportsink.com advertised with Facebook, the site spent $5,000 (£3,100) on ads and a PPC management fee of $1,500 (£940), generating 1,234 visitors through Facebook click-throughs.

However, in the same month it generated 1,723 visitors who found the site through Google and has since discontinued its Facebook campaign, now attracting more than 4,000 Google visitors per month.

"We've been able to test PPC and SEO with a number of clients, and in each case we found that while PPC offered immediate results, SEO was the more cost-effective and better solution long-term," commented Pilot Fish president Angela Charles.

It follows news that Bill Gates, one of the most successful software entrepreneurs in the world, recently received some SEO advice for his blog from Danny Sullivan of searchengineland.com.