Search Engine Optimization: For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 18. Paying Per Click

In This Chapter

• Pay-per-click basics

• Figuring out how much a click is worth

• Creating ads that are acceptable

• Automating pay-per-click campaigns

Here's a quick way to generate traffic through the search engines: Pay for it. Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns provide a shortcut to search engine traffic, and many companies, particularly large companies with large marketing budgets, are going directly to PPC and bypassing the search engine optimization stage totally.

In this chapter, you examine these PPC programs, discover their advantages and disadvantages, and find out how and where to employ them. It's an overview, of course. If you decide to spend money on this form of advertising, I recommend that you read the quite splendid Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing For Dummies (Wiley Publishing, Inc.) by, um, me.

Defining PPC

If you use PPC advertising, you pay each time someone clicks on one of your ads. Figure 18-1 shows search results at Google, and Figure 18-2 shows results for the same search at Yahoo! You can see that many of the search results on these pages are actually ads. They're placed mainly based on pricing. (Google AdWords, as their PPC ads are known, is a special case, as I explain in a moment.) In other words, instead of going through all the trouble of optimizing your site and getting links from other sites into your site — the things that are explained in most of the rest of this book — you can simply buy your way to the top of the search engines! ...