What are Paid Submissions

The top search engines use a paid listings database from people like Overture. That means that you can be guaranteed to appear in the top results for the terms you are interested in. You agree to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. You are allowed to "bid" on the search words you wish to appear for. Paid listings are an option for businesses wishing to build visibility fast.

There are several search engines, which will rank your web site according to how much you are prepared to pay them. These are usually set up on a Pay Per Click basis i.e. you pay a set amount of money every time someone searches for keywords or key phrases on which you are bidding and clicks on your link to visit your web site. The higher your bid, the higher your web site is placed when someone searches for your chosen key phrases.

Pay per click is a very controllable way of marketing your site. You may change your bids up or down at a moment's notice and you can set limits of how much you will pay each month. If no one clicks on your listing, you don't pay a penny, yet your site's entry is still seen by the people using these sites. They soon get to recognise your name thus establishing branding of your company's name and its services.

For instance, let's say you wanted to appear in the top listings for "taxi Gatwick." You might agree to pay 25p per visitor. If no one agrees to pay more than this, then you would be in the number one spot. If someone else later decides to pay 26p, then you slip down to the number two position. You could then bid 27p and move back on top, if you wish to.

Few people go directly to the Overture web site to search. Most people encounter Overture's paid listings via the search engines. The very top listings for "taxi gatwick" at overture would also appear in the "Sponsored Links" section at the top of AOL Search's results. Details of the Overture listings program can be found at Overture. If you want visitors quickly, then Overture is a useful option. It is easy to open an Overture account and by carefully selecting targeted terms, you can stretch a limited budget for one or two months and get quality traffic. After the first few months, you should find that the editorial listings in the search engine directories have kicked in. This may mean that you can eliminate your spend with Overture entirely. On the other hand, you may find that you want to continue spending and perhaps even increase your budget, to target terms where you don't receive good editorial placement.

Google sells paid listings that appear above and to the side of its regular search results. It takes time for a new site to appear within Google so this offers a fast way to get listed with the service.

Getting to the top of search engines using pay per click is fast and guaranteed but at the same time it can be time consuming and expensive. For instance, you can end up bidding in excess of £4 for some keywords. In a year sites could be spending an extra £50,000+. Some keywords are beyond the means of small businesses.

Each advertiser will manage between one and thousands of keywords that they would like their website(s) associated with. Each keyword needs to be managed individually in order to make sure that the bid (amount per click) remains competitive in order to show up in the top of the results.

One of the main advantages of PPC is that no changes are necessary to the front end design of your website. As long as the keywords you submit to a paid listings directory are relevant to the product or service you provide you can maintain a high ranking on that engine listing without any form of optimisation. Another advantage is that you can find out exactly how many people are visiting your site and precisely what your return on investment is from the paid listings campaign.

But the obvious disadvantage is that campaigns can be very costly, which is why so many people favour search engine optimisation, as it has a better return on investment on the long run. Paid listings cannot get you into all the major searches and even if you did try, it would be very expensive. Overall traditional search engine listings offer better value for money in the long term since you are not paying per click.