Title:

Search Engine Strategies

Author:

Carl Johnson

Advantages of Pay Per Click Advertising

When you do a search, you'll usually notice that the very first items to be listed are listed under a section called "sponsored matches". This is how you can secure that critical top section across many popular search engines, and be seen first over all other listings, even expertly placed SEO listings. Also, if you are willing to pay more per click-through than your competitors, you can guarantee top listing.

Why Search Engine Submission and/or Optimization (SEO) Fails Today
Several years ago, SEO was the hottest way to market a site online. Not many businesses knew about how to accomplish this, and minimal effort produced maximum results. Companies would charge anywhere from $800 to several thousand to register you manually to many search engines, and create separate 'doorway pages' for each and every keyword/search engine combination. And it was worth every penny!

I used to charge up to $2000 for this, and had some impressive results, gaining my own sites and the sites of my clients top 10 listings in many engines. However, this was highly time consuming. To register 50 search terms (far too few in today's competitive Internet, and more than I ever optimized for), to 12 search engines, would take 600 separate doorway pages! At 30 minutes per page ($25, let's say), that's $15,000 of work. All that effort, and it would still take months to be listed. Today, SEO is much more well known, and so there's no guarantee that you'd even show up on the first search page, ahead of others. Rank number 11, an impressive feat, but is still page 2 of most search results pages, and very few people will ever see your listing and get to your site. It could take years to even break even in today's marketplace.

And if that's the issue with an expert performing an SEO campaign done correctly, think about what your average web designer does when they claim to be able to promote your site. They simply auto submit your single set of un-optimized pages with generic META TAGS, to all search engines at once. Not only do most engines recognize and throw out auto-submitted sites, but if the META TAGS work for one site, another will consider them 'keyword spamming' and can even blacklist your site URL. You may be lucky enough to rank somewhere in the top 100 for several engines, but could be blacklisted from EVER being added to many more engines. The end result can actually be more harmful than if your site was never listed at all. Even if they do show up, they'll be hundreds or thousands of listings below the sites who do optimize, and never seen by anyone except spammers. In fact when someone claims to submit your site to 'hundreds' or 'thousands' of search engines, most of these so call engines are portals designed to harvest your email address, for purposes of spamming. In short, it's simply a waste of time that never translates into sales or profit.

Pay-per-click is Better, Cheaper, Faster, and MUCH More Effective
How would your business do if you knew for sure that next week, your site pops up #1, ahead of all competition, for any number of keywords you choose, on the top 12 search engines such as Yahoo, MSN, Alta Vista, Excite, etc? What if you only had to pay for traffic when people actually visited your site? What if you could pre-qualify visitors so that the ones who did visit, that you paid for, already know what you sell, and are very interested buyers?

Say you sell acrylic paints for artists. Someone logs into Yahoo and searches for 'discount acrylic paint', and voila! Your site is number one. A properly written listing should pre-qualify visitors and discourage freebie-seekers. Only if they click through to your site after reading your description do you pay the small fee for that visitor. This fee is usually $.10 - $.50 per click - although it could be several dollars for very generic terms in competitive industries - that's part of the trick in designing a cost effective campaign, deciding which terms to use, how high to bid, to avoid potential disaster of draining your funds paying for visitors that are not qualified.

Those are some of the advantages of a properly and expertly designed campaign.

Click here to get started. Your email client will pop up. Tell me a little about your business and what you'd like to achieve, and I'll be in touch shortly. You could be enjoying guaranteed #1 search engine listings for many different keywords/phrases, and a drastic sales increase within as little as a week. Click now, before your competition finds me...

I can customize a campaign just for you. In some cases a pay-per-click campaign will not be appropriate for your business. In that case, I can design and implement a plan using methods which will work for you. I've got several online businesses and I know many methods to promote a site for minimal cost to gain maximum exposure. I've yet to meet or even hear of any company anywhere that has this knowledge, and provides services to companies. Even supposed 'Internet Marketing' companies have never even heard of much of this! Don't believe me? Try finding one! Ask them if they can help you run a pay-per-click campaign, help set up an in-house newsletter, design a sequential autoresponder campaign to automate your lead generation and sales, or consult you on how to properly run a USENET forum campaign. Tell me what you find...

What About Pop-Ups or Banner Ads?

These types of methods are CPM (cost per thousand) impressions. When you pay for a pop up or a banner, you usually don't have control over which sites you'll show up on. They may show your banner or do a pop up when you visit sites in similar industries. The problem is, you are paying for how many times your ad appears, regardless of whether someone closes it, or simply ignores it without clicking to your site.

Banner ads are very ineffective today, most people have learned to ignore them. Pop-ups are similar, most people just click them closed, they tend to have a negative appeal for consumers. For banners, and possibly some pop-ups, if you have the ability to pick and choose exactly on which sites they appear, and choose sites very specific to your industry, either of these can work. But you can also spend all your money on a campaign that doesn't deliver a single qualified lead to your site.