Part IV: Marketing your Website - Paying for High Rankings

Pay Per Click Help Tips - Search Engine Pay for Placement Overview

by Pauline Sugarman

Created July 2004; Revised February 2006

Search Engine providers, such as Google, are, like everyone else on the internet, trying to figure out how to make their businesses profitable. One avenue they have come up with is to start charging for special placement (at the top) of their search engine results. Search Engine companies could see that being found at the top of a search result was big business for those lucky companies so why not charge for it and get in on the profits. For that matter, why not charge people for the privilege of just being in the search database at all.

In this section of the Pay Per Click Help Tips we will discuss the different ways that search engines and directories are charging for their services, including the two most popular: Pay Per Inclusion (PPI) and Pay Per Click (PPC).

Pay for Inclusion (PPI)

Quite a few of the directories and search engines (well, actually all of them except Google) charge a fee, in most cases around $40, for the privilege of being reviewed for inclusion in their databases. Paying the Inclusion fee ONLY goes towards getting your site into the database; it does not help you to get a high ranking.

Most PPI services charge by the page for inclusion. In other words, you must pay for each page of your website that you want included, but there are usually discounted rates for submitting the additional pages. After paying the fee, there is no guarantee that you will be accepted for inclusion, but most web pages are accepted.

You can expect to have your web page reviewed within 2 to 14 days. Most PPI services state that they revisit and update their listings every 2 to 7 days.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

This paid service option is fairly explanatory, although the actual details of a PPC campaign can be quite complex. The major search engines, Yahoo and Google both offer a PPC service. Google’s version is called Ad Words. Yahoo offers Overture, the originator of PPC as well as Pay for Performance.

In basic terms, PPC is a pay per click service. You bid on certain keywords and if your bid is among the top bids, your ad will appear on the search engine’s Ad area or “sponsored listings” area. Once the bid price is set, you pay the search engine that bid amount for every visitor that clicks on your ad to be taken through to your web site. It doesn’t matter if that visitor immediately abandons your website, you still pay for the click-through.

If a new bidder comes in and raises the bid price, you could loose your place, at which point you will have to decide if you want to raise your bid for that key word or bid on other less competitive keywords. If there is a lot of bidding going on you could spend a lot time monitoring your ads and the amount you are spending.

Next, as part of the Pay Per Click Help Tips, we will discuss The Pros and Cons of Paying for Placement...

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