Search Engine Advertising: The Single Most Important Success Factor

Writen by Christopher J Enders

Search engine advertising is, undoubtedly, the single most
important factor to the success of an online business. If you
have an internet business and you do not engage in search engine
advertising, that is no different from opening a retail shop on
an isolated street and relying on walk-in traffic to keep your
business afloat.

Sure, you may get a little bit of traffic without search engine
advertising, but a little bit of traffic is not going to build
your business, generate sufficient profit, or be worth your time.
It is sure not going to provide you with a viable work-from-home
opportunity. A large majority of the traffic to a website comes
from the search engines, thus, search engine advertising is not
an option for an online business; it is crucial.

The terms "search engine optimization" and "search engine
advertising" are sometimes used interchangeably. In general,
search engine optimization is the process of getting your website
ranked in the search engines without paying for the ranking.
Search engine advertising, on the other hand, generally deals
with paid advertising that results in your website being listed
in the search engines.

True, for many businesses that have niche markets, it is possible
to get top ranking in the search engines without spending
advertising dollars to get that ranking. It is not a futile
effort to try and get a good ranking in the search engines
without spending money on search engine advertising; however, in
most cases search engine advertising is necessary.

Search engine advertising campaigns may include strategies for
getting your website listed in the major search engines, using
pay-per-click search engines, and getting listed in specialty
search engines, directories and portals. The major search engines
are spidering search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask
Jeeves. There are also meta search engines, like Dogpile and
MetaCrawler, that draw results from more than one of the major
search engines.

Specialty search engines, directories and portals are generally
dedicated to a specific topic or industry. Some offer free
submissions, some sell flat-rate listings and others sell pay-
per-click advertising. All of these options for search engine
advertising are worth looking into. The most common search engine
advertising is the use of pay-per-click search engines.

Search engine advertising via pay-per-click search engines makes
a lot of sense because when you advertise through a pay-per-click
search engine, you only get charged when someone clicks on your
advertisement and is directed to your website. You have control
over your search engine advertising expenses with pay-per-click
services because most of them allow you to set a budget and you
won't receive clicks over your stated budget.

With pay-per-click search engine advertising, you bid on
keywords. Basically, the highest bid gets the highest ranking. A
definite advantage to pay-per-click search engine advertising is,
unlike major search engine submissions that can take weeks to get
listed, once you set up your pay-per-click search engine
advertising, your site will be listed within a few hours.

I have learned that the best pay-per-click search engine
advertising programs are Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search
Marketing (previously known as Overture). Google Adwords is a
little different from traditional pay-per-click search engine
advertising programs because ranking does not rely solely on the
amount of your bid. The program also considers your click-
through-rate for ranking purposes.

This evens the playing field a little bit because the rank is not
determined only by how much you can pay for advertising, but also
considers the quality and desirability of your advertised
offering. I recommend Google Adwords for your search engine
advertising, because Google is the most used search engine on the
net.

When you use Yahoo! Search Marketing for your search engine
advertising, your site will be listed in rank based on your
keyword bid. A major advantage to using Yahoo! Search Marketing
for your search engine advertising is that it provides results to
a number of different search engines and search services, rather
than to just one search engine. Some of the major places your
search engine advertising may appear when you use Yahoo! Search
Marketing's pay-per-click services include Yahoo! (of course),
MSN, AltaVista, and Netscape, just to name a few.

Copyright Christopher J. Enders. Are you at the end of your rope,
fed up and confused by all the scrambled internet marketing
advice you're getting? Whether you are new to internet marketing,
or a website owner who wants to make more money from your
website, learn the proven strategies that will sky-rocket your
internet business at http://BiznessTips.com