Website Promotion
Pay Per Click Search Engines
Free search engines such as google, yahoo and lycos are an essential aid when it comes to generating traffic to your site, but if you're running any sort of business it's extremley unlikley that you can survive on these listings alone.
Pay per click search engines allow you to target your traffic more effectivley, the basic procedure of these type of search engines is that you bid for certain keywords related to your product or service. When people search for a certain term, providing you have one of the leading bids for that search your listing will be displayed at the top of the results.
Obviously certain terms and keywords have a greater value than others, and you would need to bid higher in order to secure listings on extremley popular searches, but the best thing about the pay per click search engines is that you only pay each time your listing is clicked, not each time it's displayed so it's a very good way to maximise your advertising budget and ensure that you're not paying for links to be displayed that people may never even click.
Some tips for pay per click (ppc) search engines:
- Prepare your site - As with all types of advertising, no matter how much you invest in getting people to click your links, if you're website is not ready for them when they arrive, they will soon leave. Make sure that any special deals or offers that you're promoting are clearly visible from your homepage.
- Targetting with descriptions - When using pay per click search engines it can often be alot more productive to bid on slightly less common keywords, but prepare a good description of one particular deal or offer for your listing. Bidding on high priced "general" keywords may generate more traffic, but you'll find alot of it is just people randomly clicking and browsing, rather than traffic that is going to make a purchase.
There are literally hundreds of pay per click search engines around, and like everything else many will be more productive that others, some of the better choices would be sites like overture, kanoodle and findwhat.
There's also several pay per click review sites that will help you get a better idea of what you can expect from the different search engines before you start investing your money, like payperclicksearchengines.com
Pay Per Click Directories
Aswell as the general pay per click search engines, there's also a rapidly growing number of similar services that are directed at one type of product or service.
One of the most saturated areas of this market is probally for webhosting services, there's a huge amount of pay per click web hosting directories, and many would be a better choice for people in this type of business than the general search engines.
Whichever type of business you're in do some research into these, use the search engines yourself to locate them, it's quite often that for large industries you'll even find many directories that offer free listings for your site or services.
It's fair to say that these sites offering free listings will not generate you any huge amount of visits, but you'd be mad to pass up any opportunity to get your website listed somewhere that generates traffic that could be interested in your services.
Don't forget also that some of the bigger general search engines like google, base your rankings partly on the amount of links pointing to your website, so at the very least if you don't recieve any traffic from service specific directories, it can still only help in the long run, however, providing you choose your bids carefully, and have a good knowledge of what people looking for your services are likley to search for then the pay per click directories can usually become a very effective way of increasing your business.