Pay Per Click (PPC) is an advertising method that can be used to promote your website. By placing a PPC ad, you are paying the search engines to bring traffic to your website. You, the advertiser, pay a "cost per click" each time a person clicks on your ad.
This cost is determined by the amount you bid for each keyword associated with your ad. You place an ad using the keywords you want to reference to your website, and place a bid on those keywords for placement rank. The higher the bid, the higher rank you can obtain in the search engine for placement of your ad. When a person searches for your keyword, your ad will appear in the search results. Each time your ad is clicked on, you are charged the amount that you bid on for the word being searched.
There are several PPC search engines. The most popular ones in the US these include: . Google .
Yahoo . MIVA . Kanoodle . LookSmart . Lycos .
goClick . Enhance . Searchfeed .
ePilot . Search123 . 7Search In the UK these include: . MIVA UK .
Mirago When you place your PPC ad campaign with one the search engines, be sure the keywords that you use are the same as the primary keywords used in your website. You also want the keywords to be the same as those in the title of your ad. Use very targeted keywords. Do not bid on every word that you think might relate to your site. While this may attract additional traffic to your site, it will not be the targeted traffic that you want. You want your ad to bring traffic to your site that will convert into a sale.
By placing your ad using targeted keywords, you will be bringing potential customers to your site and not visitors. Since you are paying each time someone clicks on your ad, you don't want to pay for visitors. It is also advantageous to place more than one ad campaign for your site. The second ad campaign would contain targeted keywords that were different from the ones used in the first ad campaign. This way, you can run a comparison of the two ad campaigns to see which one works the best and which keywords are being searched for most often. If you find that only a few keywords in each ad campaign are being searched for, you can always take those keywords that are targeted the most and put all those words in one ad campaign.
This will save you time in the long run as you will then only have to keep tabs on one ad campaign for your website. The cost of PPC can become very expensive very quickly. This cost can be controlled, however, by setting a limit on the amount that you tell the search engines you are willing to pay per day for your ad campaigns.
You can also control the amount of clicks by only using targeted keywords related to your website. If used properly, PPC is a great way to get targeted traffic to your website. Just make sure your ad campaigns are set up to use the same keywords that your website is optimized for. When you set up an ad campaign, the search engine will crawl your website.
If the keywords in your ad campaign are different from those in your website, you will have a higher bid rate. Don't run one ad campaign with 100's of keywords. Run two or more ad campaigns using a smaller number of targeted keywords. The search engines are constantly changing their rules and guidelines.
Be sure to keep current with all the changes and adjust your ad campaigns accordingly.
Loretta Miller runs a site where the goal is to help people increase the traffic to their website. http://increasesales.wordpress.com/
