Pay per click is a method that you can use to generate traffic to your website.
It will cost you some money and if not managed carefully can be very expensive
What is pay per click?
Pay per click [PPC] is a way of putting little adverts for your website on the search engines results pages and even on other people's websites.
The pay per click ads are placed by you with the search engine of your choice and then they in turn display your ads on relevant webpages.
You pay a certain small amount each time someone clicks on your ad.
If you type in a search phrase into the google search bar, the results displayed are in two columns.
The main column which usually occupies the left side and middle of the SERPs page are organic results. These are results webpages that are indexed in Google or whatever the search engine it is you are using, and are listed based on relevance to the search term. They are not payed inclusions.
Now on the top and down the right side of the page is another set of listings usually under the title sponsored links [if you are using Google] or sponsor results [in Yahoo]. These are paid for by the owners or affiliates of the website and are known as pay per click campaigns. Or, in the case of Google, google adwords campaigns
The beauty of pay per click is that you choose
* What keywords you want your adverts to appear under
* How much you are willing to pay per click. This is known as your bid amount.
* How much you want to spend per day
* Which countries or regions your ads should be displayed in
* Whether you want you ads to also be displayed in other peoples websites
* What the wording of you ad should be.
Pay per click advertising is a great way to generate instant, targeted traffic to your website, whereas with search engine optimization, the results of your efforts are not immediate.
For long term traffic generation, Search engine optimization cannot be beaten but, while waiting for your website to rank well with the search engines, PPC is a good traffic generating option
However PPC must be used with caution. We will discuss the pit falls of using pay per click in the section on pay per click pitfalls
There are several websites and search engines that provide pay per click services.
The major ones are
Google adwords:
Launched in 2000, it's hard to believe that the most successful pay per click program on the internet is only 8 years old. Yahoo search marketing is another one.
