Paid Search Engine Placement and Search Engine Optimization

September 15, 2004 – 3:00 am

By James Peggie

Paid search engine placement can be used as part of your Internet marketing strategy to give your business an increased competitive advantage. This is because it gives you immediate control over your search engine rankings. This is one of the big differences between paying for rankings and rankings achieved through “organic” search engine optimization (SEO) where the results are achieved through a persistent and long term strategy. With paid search engine placement you pay to get immediately highly ranked in specific search engines.

Paid search engine placement usually takes the form of Pay Per Click (PPC). This requires you to pay only when someone clicks through to your site. PPC can be an effective addition to your overall search engine strategy as it can get you off and running quickly.

The main PPC providers, Overture and Google Adwords use systems based on bidding. Whoever pays the most gets the highest ranking. Adwords differs from Overture in that they also use a click-through-rate which rewards high click through rates with better pricing.

As with “organic” search engine optimization you will need to define the keywords that your audience will use to find your product. Your keywords are an important part of your sales message. Bear in mind that popular keywords will be more competitive and may have higher bids associated with them. This means that you will have to pay more if you use common keywords or phrases. Remember that if you use the wrong keywords you will get visitors that do not respond to your message.

The great thing about search engine placement through PPC is that you can get information and modify your campaign in real time. You can check the effectiveness of your PPC campaign by using the reporting tools that are offered by your PPC provider. This tells you how much business the campaign is bringing you. You can get immediate return on investment information. You can monitor your PPC ads and if they are not effective you can quickly change them. The key is to watch how much you spend and change the ads if they are not working.

Paid search engine placement can be an important part of your Internet marketing strategy. It is a great way to get it up and running very quickly. It also gives you a good insight into how effective your keywords are and an opportunity to try out different ones. “Organic” search engine optimization is much more cost effective in the long term. (3 months+) search engine optimization also gives your site exposure for a wide variety of keyword phrases across many directories and search engines. The two systems can be used effectively together so that you can make full use of your Internet marketing options over a period of time. This will help your business maximize its online marketing efforts.