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Article:
Paid Search Engine Advertising by: John Eberhard Over the last few years, we have seen the rise of a new medium which at the current time is quite effective in driving traffic to web sites: Paid Search Engine Advertising. This term refers to paid advertising that a company can run on search engines, so that when a person enters a specific search term or phrase, your ad appears. For instance, if someone goes to a search engine and enters 'antivirus software', you will see regular search results that come up for this term, but on many search engines, you will also see paid advertising, usually labeled as 'sponsored links.' That means that some company that sells antivirus software has paid to have that listing appear when anyone enters the search term 'antivirus software.' Similarly, if you entered 'golf equipment,' you would see the regular listings but also a bunch of sponsored links from companies selling golf equipment. One can choose any word or phrase at all and choose to have your ad appear when people enter that phrase on that search engine. However, you will want to select words or phrases that are at least somewhat popular, i.e. that a lot of people are entering. That way you get decent exposure for your ad. One of the biggest advantages to this type of advertising is that you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad and thus arrives at your web site. You start an account with one of these search engines, put some money in it, and every time someone clicks on your ad and comes to your site, your account is debited. This is has an advantage over most other types of advertising, where you pay whether there is any result or not. With paid search engine advertising, you only pay for actual traffic coming to your web site. A number of regular search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, HotBot, and Lycos, are currently including sponsored links as part of their search results. For Google, the most popular of all the search engines currently, the sponsored links appear in the narrow, far-right column (and sometimes along the top), whereas the regular search results appear in the wider left-hand column. Google's paid ads program is called 'AdWords.' There are also search engines that are called 'pay-per-click' search engines, where all the results are sponsored links. In other words, if you want to have your web site appear on a pay-per-click search engine, you have to open an advertiser account and pay money to have your listing appear. Overture.com is the biggest of the pay-per-click search engines. Others include FindWhat, Search'123
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