All You Need to Know About Pay Per Click Search Engines

By Merle
Posted Friday, July 16, 2004

How to use PPC search engines to increase your traffic

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 you're not familiar with them let's 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, you're charged the amount you have bid. If they don't click, your account is not charged.

Overture was the very first PPC S.E. in existence and it's 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 Overture's 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. We'll 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 it's 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 PPC's is choosing the keywords/phrases you wish to bid on. You don't want to be too broad and bid on one word; you'll do better by being more specific and coming up with or 2 or 3 word combinations to bid on. You don't want to pay for untargeted traffic, and if your keyphrases aren't relevant to your site, that's exactly what you'll be doing.

For example, let's say your site sells model trains. Don't bid on the word "trains" alone but use "model trains." That way you're 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 don't want to pay for untargeted traffic.

There are many tools you can use online that will help you in choosing just the right keywords. You'll 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 won't be as good, so you'll need to come up with quite a few.

Some of the best are:

Overture's 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)

You'll 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 won't cost you a fortune or break the bank.

About the Author
Merle is an internet marketer, promotion consultant and ezine publisher. Visit her sites at (http://www.mcpromotions.com/), (http://www.merlesworld.com/) and (http://www.ezineadauction.com/).