All You Need to Know About Pay Per Click Search Engines (Part 1 of a 3 Part Series)

Pay Per Click Search Engines (aka PPC) are all the rage these days and for very good reasons. They are an inexpensive way of achieving targeted traffic. If youre not familiar with them lets go over the basics.

With PPC search engines, you bid on keywords/phrases and when someone searches for those keywords, your site will appear on the search results page. If someone clicks on your site, youre charged the amount you have bid. If they dont click, your account is not charged.

Overture was the very first PPC S.E. in existence and its still the largest and most effective. Their success is mostly due to the extensive relationships they have in place with many of the major search engines. When bidding with Overture, the top three bid positions will also appear on some of the majors like Altavista, Yahoo and others. These listings generally show up under the heading of "sponsored links."

Thanks to Overtures success, many other engines have appeared on the Net, all vying for the PPC dollars. But you need to be careful here, as many of them are not worth your time or advertising dollars. Well discuss these in more depth in Part 2 of this series.

Remember, visitors who come to your site via a search engine are already targeted leads, and once they get there its up to you to convert them into buyers. No PPC S.E. will make the sale for you; that is always determined by the strength of your ad copy. Your site must convert visitors into buyers, and the only way to do that is with strong ad copy that convinces them to take action.

The biggest task in signing up with PPCs is choosing the keywords/phrases you wish to bid on. You dont want to be too broad and bid on one word; youll do better by being more specific and coming up with or 2 or 3 word combinations to bid on. You dont want to pay for untargeted traffic, and if your keyphrases arent relevant to your site, thats exactly what youll be doing.

For example, lets say your site sells model trains. Dont bid on the word "trains" alone but use "model trains." That way youre targeting those who are specifically searching for model trains and not those who may be looking to take a trip on trains. Are you following me here? Again, you dont want to pay for untargeted traffic.

There are many tools you can use online that will help you in choosing just the right keywords. Youll have your best luck bidding on as many keyword combinations as you can think of. If you only choose a handful of keywords your results wont be as good, so youll need to come up with quite a few.

Some of the best are:

Overtures Keyword Generator
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

"Jim Tools" also has a nice selection
http://www.JimTools.com

Keyword Miner- Free Software
http://engineready.com/freeware/keywordminer/index.html

Word Tracker
http://www.WordTracker.com

Youll be amazed at the number of keyword combinations you can come up with by using one of the above tools. They really make it easy to come up with the best phrases for your PPC campaign.

For more information on PPC search engines, you may want to investigate these:

http://www.PayPerClickGuide.com
http://www.PayPerClickSearchEngines.com
http://www.PayPerClickAnalyst.com
http://www.PPC-Directory.com
http://www.SearchEnginePayPerClick.com

Adding pay per click search engines to your website promotional strategy is a smart move. The trick is to bid on enough keywords and keep your bids at the bare minimum. The results will be highly targeted traffic that wont cost you a fortune or break the bank.

In Part 2 of this article series well examine some of PPCs major players more closely.

About the author

Merle (just Merle, thank you) is an experienced Internet Marketer/Promoter. She knows what it takes for business websites to be successful. She has been online for over four years and has two other websites to her credit: MC Promotions - http://www.mcpromotions.com and Merles World - http://www.merlesworld.com

merle@mcpromotions.com
http://www.marketingchallenge.com