Pay Per Click Search Engine Guide

by David Callan of AKA Marketing.

What are pay per click search engines?

Pay per click search engines (also called pay-for-performance, paid listings among other names) are engines which allow site owners to determine their sites ranking in that particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first 3-5 search results are used by a network of partner search sites. The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted traffic and a lot more sales.

So the underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid (how much you are willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results) and buy high positions on your chosen engine. The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you will have to bid to get high rankings. The only limitation is that your site must be at least vaguely relevant to the keyword you want to bid on. These engines allow you to skip all the search engine optimization stuff and simply pay for visitors.

Pay per click search engines have a number of benefits to any webmaster.

• Only pay for visitors, unlike banner advertising where you have to pay each time someone sees your ad, on pay-per-click engines you only have to pay when someone clicks on your listing. So you are getting guaranteed visits.
• Pay-per-click engines provide highly targeted cheap visitors. Often you can buy a good ranking on a decent keyword for as little as 1 cent or 2 cents per click. Overture has of late installed $.05 as the minimum bid however. Popular search terms can cost much more on the big pay per click search engines most notable overture.com and findwhat.com. Even still PPC engines are one of the most cost effective way of driving targeted people to your site.

Hopefully you will agree now that using pay-per-click engines is a great way to increase traffic and profit. OK lets talk about how to use overture.com, findwhat.com and other PPC's to make to most of your money.

Relevant terms are the ones that will bring you the highest quality traffic. Basically this means only bid on terms that are directly related to your site. For example if AKAMARKETING.COM decides to use overture or any of the other PPC search engines in the future, it would be bidding for terms such as "Internet marketing articles" and "website promotion articles" because they are the main focus of the site. Imagine if you bid for terms that were not really directly related to your website, the people that come from these terms are not likely to buy or sign up, but you still have to pay for them, it's like giving the PPC's free money so ALWAYS STAY RELEVANT.

Bid on as many low-cost relevant terms as you can. The cost of a top position with overture or any of the other big PPC's depends upon the keyword you are bidding on and how many people search for it. If you have to bid on a popular word such as 'Internet marketing' be prepared to pay around $2 - $4 for a decent position. But what if you went for "Internet marketing articles" it costs less than a quarter of the price, it will produce far less visits of course, but is much more cost effective. Imagine doing this on a wide scale basis, securing lots of low-cost positions, the combined traffic from these positions will add up to the level produced by a popular keyword - but at a fraction of the cost.

It used to be a good idea to bid on all relevant terms (if you could), however some of the big PPC's now require a $.05 minimum bid. This means some terms will not be worth it, terms that are worth it will contain several words and are highly targeted, meaning that the searcher who clicks through is really interested in your page and more likely to buy/sign up.

Most pay-per-click search engines allow you to link directly to the relevant page of your site. This means that you are giving the searcher exactly what he or she is looking for. This way you are more likely to make a sale as the visitor is in the right mind-frame to buy and will not get lost or give up before finding the page that he or she is looking for.

If you have read the articles on search engine optimization you will have learnt that it is more likely visitors will click through if their search term is in the title and description of your listing this is because it appears to be exactly what they were searching for. So always try to include the exact search term in your title or description. Furthermore make your title and description as descriptive as possible. This has a few benefits.

• Searchers are much more likely to click on a link if they know where it's going.
• It saves you money because the people that click through are really interested in your page because your title and description is very 'descriptive'. If your title was not descriptive they would click through and investigate, if you didn't have what they wanted they would leave and you have just lost money.

Remember with pay per click search engines you are only paying for actual visitors and not views of your listing, so being listed in the top 1-3 positions, is not always the best strategy because the quality of people who click on top listings might not be of the highest standard. This is because a lot of searchers seem to click on a high listing without actually reading it, again if you didn't have what they wanted they would leave and you have just lost money. Whereas if someone clicked through on a site ranked 19th after scanning through all the descriptions briefly they would be a much higher quality visitor because they have hunted down exactly what they wanted and are genuinely interested in that site. These people are the visitors you want as they are much more likely to buy your product or sign up to your newsletter.

Bidding on a top 3 position is a good strategy however on less popular words and phrases as this means they will show up on partner sites. (Overture.com partners with Yahoo and MSN among others) These words are far cheaper than more searched for general words and have a better visitor to sale ratio. A PPC search engines partner sites will help get the search count up on these words.

Get specific - generally the more words a keyphrase you bid on has the more likely a visitor will become a customer. Once again you only pay for clicks not views so you don't lose money if no one clicks and if they do the chances are good that they'll buy from you. It's very hard to lose money on really specific keyphrases.

Well that's it. I hope you can use this information to make you a bit of money, by the way OVERTURE.COM and FINDWHAT.COM are the pay-per-click engines I recommend the most.

© David Callan

Author Details

Name : David Callan
Website: AKA Marketing
Email : admin@akamarketing.com

Google Adwords

by Rosemarie Wise of WebSiteOwner.

Lets be honest here, Google is certainly one of the biggest players as far as search engines go. The results returned by Google are fairly accurate, and while we take them for granted we cannot forget about all the days of work that must have gone into the algorithms that sort the wheat from the chaf. As this must have cost them some serious money, it would have been unfair to expect Google to keep paid advertisers from their site and it was only a matter of time before paid advertising became an option.

Getting the Balance Right

One of the problems associated with adding paid for listings to search results is that you can't simply hide the paid for links into the results of a search term. In the early days of cost per click searches it was often the companies with the deepest pockets that were guaranteed top spot for a term. The only thing such companies had to prove was that the keyword was relevant to the term, if of course the advert had to be reviewed before going live.

Search engines that offer paid for and free listings should really differentiate between the two types of link. I know that whenever I've used a traditional pay per click search engine the top few paid for terms aren't always relevant to what I was looking for, so I like to know before I click on a link if it was paid for or not.

Paid for results are fine, so long as visitors are aware they are paid for. Any pay per click engine that clearly makes the distinction between the two keeps some of its credibility by declaring its interest in a particular link.

Google Adwords Select

I'll admit I wasn't surprised when I heard that Google was offering a new cost per click program (Adwords Select); it was only a matter of time. However, having read through the way the program works, I was pleasantly surprised. Google's approach to their pay per click program is the way forward, not only does it filter out the obvious spammers in real time, but it can cut needless costs to the advertisers while maximizing their own revenue!

There is a $5 setup fee if you want to use the Adwords Select program, and the minimum charge for a click is 5 cents. While this can work out cheaper than the normal Adwords program that is based on the cost per number of impressions, it is still enough to keep some of the much smaller web site owners out of the game as it were.

Having said that the Select program offers features that can help out those that are on a pretty tight budget. To begin with there is no minimum monthly charge, so once you've paid your setup fee you will only be charged for what you use. Another handy feature that will save you any unexpected costs you can't afford is the ability to set yourself a daily budget. As soon as you've reached your daily limit, Google will temporarily remove your adverts from the keywords you're targeting.

To make your money stretch even further, you are able to set the demographics for each of your keywords. So if you are looking for visitors from a specific region or in a particular language you can tailor your adverts accordingly, which makes it easier to deal with those quirky problems normally related to cultural differences.

The most striking difference is that you don't have to pay the most per click to get the top advertising spot for a particular keyword! Your eyes are not deceiving you, a company will have to have more than deep pockets to be able to keep your site away from that top spot.

In theory, your position in the order for sponsored links will depend on the amount you are willing to pay as well as your click through rate. These figures are multiplied together to produce a rank, which is then used to determine your position in the sponsored listings. So anyone fortunate enough to have a very healthy click through rate will be able to stay near to the top.

Room for Improvement

While Google's Adwords Select program is likely to prove to be successful, I can see scope for improvement; that is, assuming they have overlooked one point that seems so glaringly obvious.

Anyone who is capable of writing a convincing advert for the program can easily achieve a high click through rate. If the positions are determined by click through and maximum price per click alone, then it could still be possible for a search engine spammer to come in and take the best position simply by writing the most convincing advert. If spammers can make the system work for them, this could potentially be harmful to the way that Google's visitors perceive them.

The fact that Google has immediate advert rotation removes a certain level of protection in that a human editor does not have the chance to review the advert and make sure that it is suitable. Perhaps what is needed is for each advert to be regularly monitored to make sure that the keyword they bid on is deemed to be important in the page that they link to.

Surely Google will have the technology to be able to cope with such checks whenever an advert is submitted or changed, as well as to check that it is still relevant whenever Googlebot pays its regular visits. If they haven't implemented it already, then I think such checks will benefit everyone; Google, site owners and searchers alike!


© 15/05/2002 Rosemarie Wise

Author Details

Name : Rosemarie Wise
Website: WebSiteOwner.

How To Get Improved - Search Engine Rank Using Squidoo and SEO

By Peter Nisbet (c) 2008 If you know how to use Squidoo to achieve improved search engine rank of your web pages, then you have a tool at your disposal that can be just as powerful as using traditional search engine optimization, if not more so. One important facet of your Squidoo lens is that it could be listed on Google, or any of the other search engines, for your major keywords, and you should not lose sight of any promotional techniques that provide you with free exposure on search engines. If you Blink your Squidoo lens, you can win every way. Not just with Blinklist, but you can have it listed on just about every social networking site you can think of, Technorati and Deli.cio.us included. Also Furl, Craigslist, Stumbleupon and any of the many others out there. For those not totally aware of what Squidoo is, I don't intend to go into the ethos of the site right here, other than to state that it can be used as a promotional tool as well as a being a virtual website. Your lens can also be given a Google PageRank. You can use your Squidoo lens in place of a minisite in order to promote yourself and your product, and improve your search engine listing. You can use it as a showcase for your products, your blogs or even your websites, and draw traffic to it and hence to those other online ventures you are involved in. In order to use Squidoo as a promotional tool for your main website you have to know a lot about the topic of your site. It is not a tool to use to sell an affiliate product, for example, unless you are an authority on that product. However, if you have written a book on a certain aspect of SEO, and want to advertise it, then Squidoo is ideal for that. The reason is that you can give in order to earn. Hence, Squidoo is great for me, because I can provide visitors to my lens with useful information on SEO, while at the same time advertising my SEO site that offers my product. I then get visitors and a link from Squidoo, both of which are great for my search engine rank, and also listing position. It might be possible just to advertise the product directly, but I prefer to provide information. That allows your visitors to become confident that know what you are talking about, and are not just a 'fly by night' that is trying to sell a product that you know nothing about. The objective of Squidoo is to provide useful information on topics to others interested in that topic. If they go to Squidoo and click on a category, they should be able to find all the info they are looking for. They don't want outright adverts, but if they find that you are providing good information, then they might want to visit your website. You give them the link to do so, and then they get more information. Part of that might be the offer to purchase your product that will possibly solve their problem. However, neither you nor they know that it will, so you provide them with a guarantee that if it doesn't work for them, they get their money back. You have used Squidoo to persuade them that you know what you are talking about, that led them to your site and more information, and then to your product. They buy it, try it, and if it works fine. If not, they get refunded. In my book that is the proper way to conduct business, and you can use Squidoo to help you with that. You can also optimize your lens for maximum search engine listing position, since your Squidoo lens should be based upon a single keyword or keyphrase to enable you to get a good listing. You can SEO a lens just as you can do a web page, and with the same effect. Free organic traffic from your listing position. To achieve all that, sign up for Squidoo, follow their instructions and get your first lens up and running, and then use it to promote your regular website and improve its ranking. You must also make sure that your customers have an out if it doesn't work for them. Squidoo provide lots of help in designing your first lens, but if you already have website then you should find it easy. Optimize your lens for the search engines and you are all set. By combining your web page, lens and blog optimization, and cross-promoting each in an intelligent way, it is difficult to see how you could fail to get high search engine listings and improved search engine rank using Squidoo and SEO. About The Author If you need more information on how to use Squidoo for improved search engine rank, here is a lens that does what I am suggesting you do. Check it out, and then sign up for Squidoo yourself from the same page. Copy what I do and you can hardly fail. The free info on the page is important, especially Improved Search Engine Rank dot com and might be all that you are looking for.

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