Introduction

As an online business owner, you already understand the importance of your URLs search engine ranking. One of the quickest ways to pull lots of prospective customers to your website is to get listed prominently in the search engines. But with over four billion web pages catalogued by search engines globally, your URL can easily get lost in the crowd. For a budget-stretching fee, pay-per-click search engines like Google and Yahoo! will place your website higher in the ranking. For most of the pay-per-click search engines the rules and listing procedures are pretty straightforward - the highest pay per click bid gets top spot. Google AdWords program is the exception, having an extra criterion that affects the position of your placement on its search result pages.

Pay-per-click search engine placements work this way: You open an account, make a minimum deposit as a starting balance, enter your website, title and description and place a pay per click bid on relevant keywords, such as "home equity loans", "research stock", "travel agent", and so on. When a visitor searches for "home equity loans" on the search engine where you have an account, the details of your site, including your URL, appear in the section named "Sponsored Links". Sites are typically ranked by the pay per click bid amount you are willing to pay with top bid at top of the list. When the visitor clicks on your link, your account is debited by the amount you have bid on that keyword. The more popular key phrase that you bid on, the higher the bid price to obtain that top listing spot.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that you pay nothing to appear on the results page per se. You only shell out the pay per click bid amount you have agreed to (or bid for) when visitors actually click on your ads and are redirected to the "landing" page on your website. You do not pay for each time your ad shows and no one clicks on it. Therefore, the term "pay per click bid" literally means just what it says: advertisers pay the auctioned (or bid) price, each time someone clicks on their ads. However, read the guidelines outlined by experts, and don't go mad with your bids - this can cost you dearly. I have seen where this simple mistake has literally brought a company to it's knees, so make sure you don't exceed your budget!