Getting your business prominently displayed in search engine results doesn’t just happen by luck. By using search engine marketing tools, such as paid inclusion, a business can increase its web presence, and thus increase its number of potential customers.
Regardless of how many or how few times certain keywords appear in a firm’s website copy, by opting for paid inclusion, a business can ensure that its website gets prominent attention. For a fee, a search engine like Google will more dominantly display a website in search engine results. With Google, paid inclusion items are clearly set off at the top of the page, appearing as advertising.
The fee structure works as a filter against superficial submissions that don’t fit the defined key words but just want to trick people into clicks. It also is a revenue generator for the search engine. Normally, the fee covers the annual subscription for one web page, which gets cataloged regularly on the search engine.
Some search engines are also testing non-subscription fees, where purchased listings can gain a permanent display. It will be interesting to see just how this changes the search engine landscape.
Fees-per-click is another search engine option. In this set-up, advertisers pay for every click the search engine sends them. Google AdWords is a major pay-per-click search engine. Search engines operating in this way deal in terms like PPC (pay per click) and CPC (cost per click). Make sure you know what you are getting when you sign up for any search engine marketing deals.
AdWords sandwiches paid listings into Google search results and other search engine sites that carry the Google listings.
Search engines differ in their fee structures. Make sure you research your options and pick a search engine set-up that works for you. Shy away from sites that only allow paid inclusion. These sites likely won’t generate much bang for your buck.
You are much more likely to find sites, like Google, that mix their paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fees) with results from web crawling, a computerized program that browses the web in a methodical and automated manner, to be more successful for you.
Google and many other search engines no longer allow payments to get into the search engine listings. If you are going to pay your way onto the web with Google and other more reputable search engines, it will have to be through paid inclusion, which will be clearly marked as such on the search engine pages.
