Advantages to Working with Pay Engines

The pay engines offer many advantages to Web site owners, including:

1. If you have a brand new site with little or no visibility and no link popularity, pay engines are certainly a way to get started fast while you wait for your standard search engine marketing efforts to kick in and take effect.

2. Pay-per-click engines are ideal for holiday promotions, special sales, or to jump start slow engine traffic.

3. With pay engines, you have instant visibility in whichever search engines display those results.

4. You choose your rankings, depending on how deep your pocket book is.

5. If some of your keywords aren't performing, you can choose other ones.

6. You only pay for clicks to your site, so you can target your traffic by keywords you choose.

7. With regular optimization efforts, it's sometimes difficult to achieve top rankings if you're in a highly competitive field. With pay engines, you pay for your rankings, and VOILA! You're there!

8. Purchasing keywords is certainly easier and less time consuming than optimizing your pages.

9. With regular engines, when algorithms (or ranking criteria) change, you can find yourself booted out of your top spot. With pay engines, as long as you're willing to hand out cash, you'll be on top.

10.You can target your audience based on keywords you choose. Most Web sites have multiple target audiences, so pay-per-click keywords are a way to reach each of those target audiences.

11.Pay-per-click is generally less expensive than traditional advertising media.

12.With pay-per-click engines, you don't have to worry about design strategies that could mean death to a Web site otherwise. Is your entire site one huge Flash movie? No problem, if you go through pay engines.

Tips for Boosting Your Chances for Success with Pay Engines

When working with pay engines, it takes practice to achieve a level of success. So, start out slowly, and keep a tight rein on your budget. As you become better at crafting titles and descriptions and choosing highly targeted keywords, you’ll gradually be able to increase your budget, if you choose.

Here are some additional tips:

1. It's not always best to be #1. Many compulsive "clickers" automatically click on #1 result when they have no real interest in buying your products or services.

2. Be sure to include your keyword phrase in title and description you create at pay engines. Take special care in creating a description for your site, since within top three slots, best description gets most traffic, as a general rule.

3.Your keywords must be relevant to content of your pages. Overture is particularly careful about this.

4. Choose very targeted keywords so that you don't pay for needless click throughs. Don’t ever choose a general keyword, because your costs will skyrocket but traffic won’t convert to sales.

5. Spend time researching your keyword choices at Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

or my favorite, WordTracker: http://www.wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html

6. Generally, you'll have more success if you purchase 10- 20 keywords as opposed to just a few.

7. Choose a broad range of keywords and bid prices and test waters. Watch your keywords carefully. Non-productive keywords should be eliminated and new, more productive keywords should be purchased instead.

8. For Overture, consider purchasing a "Premium Listing," which means that you hold 1st, 2nd, or 3rd ranking for your keyword phrase. Why? Because engines like AltaVista and Lycos show first listings only.

9. Set up a separate "tracking" page to send your pay engine traffic. In order to show whether or not cost is worth it, you need to be able to track your click throughs and sales. Don't send pay engine traffic to your home page.

10.Write your title and description using “objective” language rather than “subjective.” In other words, don’t say that your product or service is best or #1 (subjective). Rather, list some of benefits of your service that make it unique (objective).

In Conclusion

You’ll find many benefits to purchasing keywords through pay-per- click engines, but you need to learn some basic guidelines before you get started. By doing so, you’ll hopefully find more successful when working with pay engines.

I take a different approach.

I ask prospect this question:

“Have you ever wondered why some web developers may offer to register you with 250 search engines for free?” The answer is simple...that's exactly what it's worth. ZERO ......I then go on to teach them how targeted traffic is only realized through achieving a high ranking on Major search engines. Show them an activity report to validate it. Then educate them about how you remain focused on optimizing their Web site for Major Search engines.

By setting realistic expectations on search engine registration, and telling them truth about where most of their traffic will come from, you once again are providing an education that others in business forget to give their clients.

5. Teach your clients about value of Manual SE Registration:

If you're like me, you only do manual registration. If you do use an auto-submission program or service, make sure it is one that works in a non-spam manner (there are not many that do).

6. Teach your clients about risk and annoyance of FFA Links:

FFA Links (which stands for Free For All links) are NOT search engines. Actually what you have probably learned by now is that many FFA sites are often times but not always, nothing more than spam sites seeking your e-mail address. Over years I have tried subscribing to these services at times just to determine if there may be any benefit. I can determine no benefit in FFA links and I like to educate my clients so they do not get sucked in by many "special offers." Educate your clients and save them headaches.

7. Build long term relationships with your clients.

Taking consultancy approach with SEO offers many opportunities to not only build customer rapport but also to maintain it on a long term basis. I see my role as teaching my clients as much as I can about Internet side of their business. The time you spend educating your client pays fairly big dividends in terms of customer loyalty. What happens after a while is, your customers will seek your advice on issues rather than just get taken advantage of by one of those e-mail deals that sounds to good to be true. Care for your client's business as if it were your own!

8. Does your client need help to write a Media Release?

This may be a stretch for some SEO's but look for opportunities to help your client promote their web site in different ways. I like to assist my clients by doing little things that are easy for me to do, don't really take too much time and add extra value to my service. Examples of these services might be to help your client write a good media release or creation of little counter top signs that advertise clients URL. Do they need a little checklist to help them promote their URL? Think value added!

9. Practice customer service excellence.

One of biggest loopholes in Internet marketing and SEO business, is lack of quality customer service. Do you return their calls? Do you look after their questions promptly? Do you keep them informed about newest trends?

10. See your customer, as a customer for life.

Care for your customers business as much as you can with full attention to detail. Most business owners are far to busy running their business to look after all of their "web presence" issues. This is why they hire you in first place. If you remember to deliver "excellence" in both customer service and communication, you'll have distinct advantages over many other competitors. Look after your customers well, and they will definitely look after you well too.