Pay Per Click: Bidding for Placement

Pay per click advertising (known as PPC) is a method of search engine marketing. It can bring additional visitors to your web site. Let's first look at how it works. You set up an account with a pay per click service and pick the phrases you would like your web site to rank high in. You bid on these phrases. Other people are also bidding on them and the highest bidder gets the top spot in the sponsored area of the search engine results page. The second highest bidder is below the first bidder and so on. So, if you bid $1.04 for the phrase "network routers" and you are the third highest bidder for that phrase on that search engine, you would be listed third in the list of sponsored ads.

How important is PPC in your overall search engine optimization plan? At the risk of sounding wishy-washy... it depends. Remember, you are spending money each time your listing is clicked on, so it is important to do your homework first. Find out how much the phrases you are after cost. Then work the math on how many clicks will produce one sale of your product or service. Only after seeing these numbers can you tell if it is worth it to jump into PPC. Lately a great many companies have thrown tons of cash at PPC to enhance their rankings. More companies than not are going in blindly and not looking at the end costs. In addition, organic search engine optimization is starting to gain momentum as companies realize the cost benefits of optimizing their site instead of using PPC. So back to the original question, how important is PPC in your overall search engine optimization plan? If you have the cash and have done your PPC math homework, then pay-per-click can be a helpful accent to your overall search engine marketing plan. If you don't have lots of cash or instead, have the skills to optimize your web site naturally (using key phrases in your text, making the site is easy to navigate, etc), then you can avoid PPC entirely.

Lastly, sponsored listings (that is, PPC ads) on the search engines have to be visually identified as such (in Google they are in light blue at the top and also listed along the right side). More and more people using the internet realize that the sponsored listings are there because companies paid to get there. These listing may not be the most relevant for the phrase they are searching on. So that fact can reduce the importance of PPC listings overall. If you have the cash and know how, use PPC with care. If you can optimize your web site naturally, you can get along without Pay Per Click.