Of all important decisions that go into a successful Pay Per Click Advertising program, most critical one is which keywords to target. Choosing right keywords will drive a continuous stream of qualified buyers to your site at affordable CPC's. Choosing wrong keywords will negate even most well planned Pay Per Click Advertising strategy.

Going Beyond The Obvious:

At first glance, choosing keywords for your Pay Per Click Advertising program seems easy. Anyone can come up with a list of obvious keywords related to their web site. The problem is, because keywords are obvious, all your competitors have come up with same list of words. This can lead to price inflation for these keywords on Pay Per Click Search Engines, making it difficult for anyone to profit from these keywords. The key to a successful PPC Advertising strategy is to identify targeted, hard to find, niche keywords that drive profitable traffic to your site.

Monetizing The "Keyword Tail"

The enormous number of queries that fall outside obvious keywords is known as "Keyword Tail". An advertiser's ability to mine "Keyword Tail" for profitable nuggets of Search terms is often difference between a successful Pay Per Click Advertising program, and one that loses money.

Examples of keywords that fall into "Keyword Tail" are singular, plural, and misspelled versions of keywords, and keyword terms related to obvious keywords for your site. For example, if you own a site that sells fishing supplies, you may come up with following list of keywords:

Obvious Keyword: Fishing

Once you venture into world of Pay Per Click advertising, you'll soon discover that marketplace is sharply divided between tier 1 Search Engines (Google and Overture), and everyone else. While it's difficult to imagine a comprehensive, successful Pay Per Click Advertising campaign that doesn't include major players, companies that limit themselves to Google and Overture may be missing out on profitable traffic.

Defining Tier 1 And Tier 2 Search Engines:

Two things separate Google and Overture from rest of Pay Per Click Search Engines. The big players deliver more traffic, and quality of clicks is often better. Simply put, if you advertise on Google and Overture your ad will be seen by more people, and these people are more likely going to buy from you. This is why its difficult to ignore big players when crafting your Pay Per Click Advertising strategy. However, if you're willing to put in effort, you'll often discover it's smaller, lesser known, Search Engines that ultimately deliver most profitable traffic to your site.

The Downside Of Being Big:

Ironically, same factors that make Google and Overture essential to any Pay Per Click Advertising campaign are also reasons it's becoming increasingly difficult for small and medium size companies to generate profitable traffic from top tier Search Engines.

Nearly every company doing Pay Per Click Advertising is using Google and Overture, meaning you're competing against virtually every company remotely connected with your industry for your keywords. As competition for your keywords increases your prices rise, and your profits fall. Both Google and Overture have hundreds of thousands of advertisers, causing keywords in some competitive industries to sell for over $10.00 per click! As this trend continues small and medium size companies will be forced to explore alternative sources of traffic if they hope to maintain their profit margins on their Pay Per Click Advertising campaigns.

The other downside of working with big Search Engines is they tend to focus their customer support resources on their big customers. This can make it difficult for smaller companies to get help optimizing their campaigns, generating lists of keywords or creating compelling ad copy.

Thankfully, there are several smaller Search Engines who can fill void by delivering high quality Search traffic at an affordable price.

The Best Of The Rest: