Search engine advertising is, undoubtedly, the single most
important factor to the success of an online business. If
you have an internet business and you do not engage in search
engine advertising, that is no different from opening a retail
shop on an isolated street and relying on walk-in traffic
to keep your business afloat.
Sure, you may get a little bit of traffic without search
engine advertising, but a little bit of traffic is not going
to build your business, generate sufficient profit, or be
worth your time. It is sure not going to provide you with
a viable work-from-home opportunity. A large majority of
the traffic to a website comes from the search engines, thus,
search engine advertising is not an option for an online
business; it is crucial.
The terms "search engine optimization" and "search engine
advertising" are sometimes used interchangeably. In general,
search engine optimization is the process of getting your
website ranked in the search engines without paying for the
ranking. Search engine advertising, on the other hand, generally
deals with paid advertising that results in your website
being listed in the search engines.
True, for many businesses that have niche markets, it is
possible to get top ranking in the search engines without
spending advertising dollars to get that ranking. It is not
a futile effort to try and get a good ranking in the search
engines without spending money on search engine advertising;
however, in most cases search engine advertising is necessary.
Search engine advertising campaigns may include strategies
for getting your website listed in the major search engines,
using pay-per-click search engines, and getting listed in
specialty search engines, directories and portals. The major
search engines are spidering search engines like Google,
Yahoo, MSN, and Ask Jeeves. There are also meta search engines,
like Dogpile and MetaCrawler, that draw results from more
than one of the major search engines.
Specialty search engines, directories and portals are generally
dedicated to a specific topic or industry. Some offer free
submissions, some sell flat-rate listings and others sell
pay- per-click advertising. All of these options for search
engine advertising are worth looking into. The most common
search engine advertising is the use of pay-per-click search
engines.
Search engine advertising via pay-per-click search engines
makes a lot of sense because when you advertise through a
pay-per-click search engine, you only get charged when someone
clicks on your advertisement and is directed to your website.
You have control over your search engine advertising expenses
with pay-per-click services because most of them allow you
to set a budget and you won't receive clicks over your stated
budget.
With pay-per-click search engine advertising, you bid on
keywords. Basically, the highest bid gets the highest ranking.
A definite advantage to pay-per-click search engine advertising
is, unlike major search engine submissions that can take
weeks to get listed, once you set up your pay-per-click search
engine advertising, your site will be listed within a few
hours.
I have learned that the best pay-per-click search engine
advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search
Marketing (previously known as Overture). Google Adwords
is a little different from traditional pay-per-click search
engine advertising programs because ranking does not rely
solely on the amount of your bid. The program also considers
your click- through-rate for ranking purposes.
This evens the playing field a little bit because the rank
is not determined only by how much you can pay for advertising,
but also considers the quality and desirability of your advertised
offering. I recommend Google Adwords for your search engine
advertising, because Google is the most used search engine
on the net.
When you use Yahoo! Search Marketing for your search engine
advertising, your site will be listed in rank based on your
keyword bid. A major advantage to using Yahoo! Search Marketing
for your search engine advertising is that it provides results
to a number of different search engines and search services,
rather than to just one search engine. Some of the major
places your search engine advertising may appear when you
use Yahoo! Search Marketing's pay-per-click services include
Yahoo! (of course), MSN, AltaVista, and Netscape, just to
name a few.
Copyright Christopher J. Enders.
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