Pay for Position and per Click Search Facilities

How they work and how you can use them for your benefit.

Pay for Position search facilities are a way of driving immediate, focused traffic to your web site. The way they work is very simple:

For an example, MakeMeTop is a UK based company which sells web site promotion services. We have ensured that we appear as one of the top results on many major International search engines for the search term 'uk web site promotion' and in the UK for 'web site promotion'. We also target people looking for 'search engine optimisation' and have listed some 100 other phrases that potential clients may type in to a search facility to find our services. 

Having selected the phrases that surfers may use, we then paid a deposit to various search facilities and bid a price to appear in their listings. If we bid higher than anyone else we get the #1 position, second highest gets #2 and so on.

The main International pay-for-position search engine is Overture (formerly GoTo), and if you go to this search engine and search for our targeted phrases you will see not only our positions for the above terms, but also the amount we bid to get that position. Google also provides a PPC method of being listed via their AdWords program.

Overture also pays other search engines a proportion of our bid price to display Overture's first 2, 3 or more results above the main results. To see how this works, use one of the above search terms and try them on AOL US, AltaVista US, HotBot, Lycos and Netscape. You will should see MakeMeTop appearing as one of the top results as a 'featured' or 'sponsoring' site (unless someone has outbid us)! 

The money we have bid for this position is only deducted from our deposit with the search facility when someone actually visits our site by clicking on the listing. Unlike banner advertisements, there is no charge for your listing appearing and not being clicked on. What you bid is what you pay for each actual visitor to your site from that search engine for that search term.

In the UK, the primary search paid positioning search facility is the UK version of Overture, then Google with Espotting being the primary rival to them both. UK Overture results now appear on AltaVista, Freeserve, Excite and Ask Jeeves UK and more UK orientated search facilities are expected to come on board. Espotting results appear on Ask Jeeves UK and UK Plus as well as other UK portals. Mirago has also recently started a facility to be a featured site on their own (free) search engine and these results also appear on Ask UK. Other engines which may be worth considering (depending on your market) are Godado and Splut.

We research the actual phrases people use to look for your type of site and then design the listings to attract your potential clients and work to get the maximum exposure for the lowest possible bid prices.

With this facility, it is possible to have your site listed in the top results of many major search engines and producing traffic to your site within a few days whereas normal search engine listings can take many weeks or months before they appear.

As more and more search engines look for ways to earn income from the Internet an increase in use of PPC methods will be inevitable. Correctly used, they can be a highly cost effective advertising medium.