You have heard about them. You have seen them popping up everywhere. Pay-per-click search engines are becoming one of the most popular methods to bring targeted traffic to your web site.




Typical search engines such as Infoseek, Altavista, Excite, etc... send a robot to spider your website and rank it according to its relevancy. It can be a very daunting task to get your website into the top ten listings for certain keywords on these search engines.

Pay-per-click search engines basically work by having people bid against each other for certain keywords. For example, if you outbid anyone for the keyword "money", your website will appear first whenever a user types in the word "money" into the search engine's search form.

The reason why listing your sites on these pay-per-click search engines can be very beneficial is because you can target the type of visitors that you want to visit your web site. You simply bid for the keywords you feel the ideal visitor for your website will type into a search form.

When deciding how you want to get listed, you need to decide on the keywords that will bring that targeted visitors to your site. Since you are paying for each time someone clicks on your link, you will want to make sure that you do not attract the wrong type of visitors.

You can easily find out what the highest bids are for your keywords by doing a search using these keywords on a pay-per-click search engine. You will notice dollar amounts at the end of each URL listed which will tell you how much they have bid to secure that ranking. Obviously the higher bidder will have the highest ranking. If there are no dollar amounts, these means that no one has bid for those keywords.

For example, if you have a website selling bridal gowns, the keywords you might choose are:

Wedding
Bride dress
Bridal dress
Bridal Gown
Bridemaid dresses
Wedding dress
Wedding Gown
etc... Choose the words that are most relevant to your website. Sit back and think about your ideal customer and the words they would typically use to find your site. Only bid on relevant terms. Irrelevant terms could bring thousands of visitors to your web site, but if they are not interested in your website's content, then you will be wasting your time and your money. A lot of pay-per-click search engines will not let you bid for irrelevant search terms because this will diminish the reputation of their searchs and frustrate their users if irrelevant websites continually pop up.

Create a title and description so that the user knows what to expect when they click on your link. Statistics also indicate that including the search term in your title or description can dramatically increase your click-thru ratio. This way you are bringing pre-qualified traffic to your site and your unique hits to sales ratio will dramatically increase. Remember that you are paying for every click, so every penny counts.

The price you bid depends very much on the profit margin of you product and your inquiry-to-sales ratio. For example, let's pretend that you have a product that has a profit margin of $10 and your inquiry-to-sales ratio is 30:1, this means that for every 30 visitors, you make one sale. The maximum you should bid to break even is:

$10.00/30 = 33 cents

Anything more than this and you will be losing money. In some cases, your bid may be well below the break even point which means that you could profit nicely from all the targeted traffic.

Most of the pay-per-click search engines are easy to sign up with. You can set up an account online with a minimum of deposit of about $25.00. A good pay-per-click search engine should provide good reporting features so you can analyze the traffic coming to your website and with which keywords.

Here are a few of the popular Pay-Per-Click Search Engines.

Goto.com

Findwhat.com

Searchhound.com

Sprinks.com

The pay-per-click search engines that I have used to list my sites provide daily reports so that I can analyze my traffic and results.