Pay-per-click Management

While not essential to a successful natural search engine marketing campaign, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in top search engines can be useful.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising involves paying each time a user clicks on your link. Different from normal search engine results in that your web site code does not have to be optimized, but you pay for each user clicking your link as opposed to each click being free as in normal search results. The advantage is that you can pay for top placement, rather than leaving your ranking to the mercy of a search engine's proprietary ranking algorithm. Two such programs are described below.

Google's own pay-per-click program is called Google AdWords.
The AdWords program allows listings to appear in boxes that run along the right-hand side (not natural listings) of Google's results page. These are sold on a self-serve basis, which means you can get started almost immediately.

Overture, now known as yahoo, is a paid placement search engine. This is yahoo's Pay Per Click engine. this is yet another way to reach even more people. This does not have as many people as Google but is still a very good PPC engine. MSN also has a great PPC search engine too and is a great way to reach your target market.

While PPC advertising is straight forward it can also become very expensive if not implemented properly. Extensive keyword research, strategic website design, title and description optimization and regular monitoring are all part of successful PPC campaigns.