Pay-Per-Clicks...One Way to Boost Traffic to Your Web Site (Part 2)

By Robin Nobles
Posted Sunday, February 15, 2004

Advantages to Working With the Pay Engines

The pay engines offer many advantages to Web site owners, including:

1. If you have a brand new site with little or no visibility and no link popularity, the pay engines are certainly a way to get started fast while you wait for your standard search engine marketing efforts to kick in and take effect.

2. Pay-per-click engines are ideal for holiday promotions, special sales, or to jump start slow engine traffic.

3. With the pay engines, you have instant visibility in whichever search engines display those results.

4. You choose your rankings, depending on how deep your pocket book is.

5. If some of your keywords aren't performing, you can choose other ones.

6. You only pay for clicks to your site, so you can target your traffic by the keywords you choose.

7. With regular optimization efforts, it's sometimes difficult to achieve top rankings if you're in a highly competitive field. With the pay engines, you pay for your rankings, and VOILA! You're there!

8. Purchasing keywords is certainly easier and less time consuming than optimizing your pages.

9. With regular engines, when algorithms (or ranking criteria) change, you can find yourself booted out of your top spot. With the pay engines, as long as you're willing to hand out the cash, you'll be on top.

10. You can target your audience based on the keywords you choose. Most Web sites have multiple target audiences, so pay-per-click keywords are a way to reach each of those target audiences.

11. Pay-per-click is generally less expensive than traditional advertising media.

12. With pay-per-click engines, you don't have to worry about design strategies that could mean death to a Web site otherwise. Is your entire site one huge Flash movie? No problem, if you go through the pay engines.

Tips for Boosting Your Chances for Success With the Pay Engines
When working with the pay engines, it takes practice to achieve a level of success. So, start out slowly, and keep a tight rein on your budget. As you become better at crafting titles and descriptions and choosing highly targeted keywords, you'll gradually be able to increase your budget, if you choose.

Here are some additional tips:

1. It's not always best to be #1. Many compulsive "clickers" automatically click on the #1 result when they have no real interest in buying your products or services.

2. Be sure to include your keyword phrase in the title and description you create at the pay engines. Take special care in creating a description for your site, since within the top three slots, the best description gets the most traffic, as a general rule.

3. Your keywords must be relevant to the content of your pages. Overture is particularly careful about this.

4. Choose very targeted keywords so that you don't pay for needless click throughs. Don't ever choose a general keyword, because your costs will skyrocket but the traffic won't convert to sales.

5. Spend time researching your keyword choices at Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/or WordTracker: wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html

6. Generally, you'll have more success if you purchase 10-20 keywords as opposed to just a few.

7. Choose a broad range of keywords and bid prices and test the waters. Watch your keywords carefully. Non-productive keywords should be eliminated and new, more productive keywords should be purchased instead.

8. For Overture, consider purchasing a "Premium Listing," which means that you hold the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd ranking for your keyword phrase. Why? Because engines like AltaVista and Lycos show the first listings only.

9. Set up a separate "tracking" page to send your pay engine traffic. In order to show whether or not the cost is worth it, you need to be able to track your click throughs and sales. Don't send pay engine traffic to your home page.

10. Write your title and description using "objective" language rather than "subjective." In other words, don't say that your product or service is the best or #1 (subjective). Rather, list some of the benefits of your service that make it unique (objective).

In Conclusion
You'll find many benefits to purchasing keywords through pay-per-click engines, but you need to learn some basic guidelines before you get started. By doing so, you'll hopefully be more successful when working with the pay engines.

About The Author
Robin Nobles, Co-Director of Training, Search Engine Workshops, teaches 2-, 3-, and 5-day hands-on, search engine marketing workshops in locations across the globe. She also teaches online search engine marketing courses and has two books available through Amazon and other bookstores. Visit (www.searchengineworkshops.com)