Pay For Placement?

Article by: Tony L. Callahan

In case you are not aware, there is a revolution happening in Internet search engines. There are search engines out there that allow you to bid on your placement under the search terms of your choice!

Pay for placement search engines are quickly taking over as the search engine of choice for both web business people and for the web consumer. This type of search engines eliminate the ambiguity of placement algorithms, allowing advertisers to directly control their placement. The consumer benefits because pay for placement eliminates the motivation of less scrupulous businesses to spam the search engine with bogus terms. Therefore, the results tend to be more targeted and productive.

It has been my experience that pay for placement search engine have one of the highest return on investment ratios of any means of advertising I use. So how can the Internet business person use the pay for placement search engines to their advantage?

First of all, I recommend bidding on as many keywords and search terms as possible. You may well ask, "Why not focus on a few highly requested terms?" The reason is simple, the high frequency terms are usually the most expensive, sometimes several dollars per click. Unless your product has extremely large profit margins or your purchase per click ratio is very high, the high frequency terms are cost prohibitive. Instead of bidding on these few terms, focus on many related terms, some of which will get you a number one listing for pennies per click.

You may be asking yourself, "So how do I go about choosing the right keywords?" The answer to that is simple and one I advocate frequently, Do Your Homework. Get a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle, making two columns. Think about the web site that you wish to list in the search engines. If you were a potential customer, trying to find your product, what term or terms would you search for? Write these terms down in the left column on your piece of paper. Next, get out a thesaurus and look up synonyms to your terms and write them down in the same column. Third, go to the search engines and perform searches on your list of terms. Visit the sites that currently enjoy top listings. View their source and make note of terms in their keywords in the right column of your list. Compare the two columns highlighting the terms in the right column that do not already appear in the left column. When finished, move the highlighted terms to the left column. In the left column you now have a list of candidate terms for your keywords.

Next, you must develop an attention catching title and description. Avoid cliché filler words and phrases. Be as descriptive as possible within the constraints imposed by the search engine. Including the search term in the title and description will increase click through rates. Test different titles and descriptions for effectiveness.

Start out bidding one cent per keyword and see where you fall in the listings. Most of the pay for placement search engines will allow you to adjust the amount of your bid, so now spend some time adjusting your bid to get the placement you want. Remember you don't have to be number one to get traffic. Usually, somewhere in the top in the top ten will do nicely. Keep track of your terms and bids in a spreadsheet. This will make it faster and easier to track your results.

Remember to monitor your keywords for positioning. Adjust your bids if necessary to maintain your position. Change the title or the description to stimulate a stale keyword.

Pay for position search engines are not a substitute for maintaining your web page. The Keywords, Description and Title Meta tags, as well as keyword density, are still critical to your positioning in the regular search engines. Utilizing these tips simply gives you another trick to add to your arsenal in the search engine wars.

Copyright 2000, 2002 Tony L. Callahan All Rights Reserved

Read more articles by Tony L. Callahan
Read marketing articles by Other Authors
Search for New Subjects

Want to use this article? You may freely reproduce this article for use on the internet or for your training materials as long as credit is given to the author and the above author description and contact information (including links or web addresses) are included.