What are pay per click search engines?

Pay per click search engines (also called pay-for-performance and 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 three to five 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.

The underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid on these keywords and buy high positions on your chosen engine. Your bid amount is the amount you're willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results.

The more times a word or phrase has been searched for the higher you'll 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.

• You only pay for visitors. Unlike banner advertising where you've to pay each time someone sees your ad pay-per-click engines only charge you when someone actually clicks on your listing. This means you're 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 notably Google Adwords, 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'll agree now that using pay-per-click search engines is a great way to increase traffic and profit. Let's now talk about how to use Overture.com, Findwhat.com and other PPC search engines to make to most of your money. A point to note before we continue, Google Adwords although similar in many ways has some fundamental differences to Overture, Findwhat and other PPC engines it therefore has been covered in its own article entitled Google Adwords guide. That's not to say however that many of the techniques found within this article can't be applied to Adwords, I'm simply saying refer to the Adwords article for the definitive Adwords guide.

Relevant terms are the ones that'll bring you the highest quality traffic. Basically this means only bid on terms that are directly related to your site. Imagine for example if www.akamarketing.com decides to use Overture or any other PPC search engine in the future, it would be bidding on terms such as "Internet marketing articles" and "website promotion articles" because they're the main focus of the site.

Now imagine if you bid for terms that weren't really directly related to your website, the people that come from these terms are not likely to buy or sign up but you've still to pay for them. It's like giving the PPC search engines free money, therefore it's vital to always stay relevant.

Continue to Pay Per Click Search Engine Guide - Part 2

Article by David Callan. David is an Internet marketing professional and webmaster of http://www.akamarketing.com/webmaster-forums/. Visit his webmaster forums for the latest discussions on search engines, website authoring and Internet marketing related issues and topics.

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