When people go to search engines to find something (your product or service), they need to first type a keyword or keyphrase in before they get a result. If you can get your name in front of them at that time that they are actively looking, you have a chance of talking to the right people at the time that they are searching. It's either gonna be you…or some other company.
When it comes to search engine advertising, the basic idea is to be in a prominent position for the right keywords that matter.
There are only two ways of getting these positions:
Search Engine Optimisation: You can optimise your site and hope that the search engines like what you do enough to give you good positions.
Paid Advertising Placements: Just like in newspaper advertising, where you can buy a specific page, in this type of search advertising, you can buy any position you want for all the keywords that matter.
Paid advertising represents the largest online marketing spend for many companies today. There are three main categories of paid placement today and we recommend a different mix for each of our clients.
- Pay Per Click
- Paid inclusion
- Contextual Ads.
Pay Per Click
The most common form of paid placement is the traditional pay per click (or AdWords) models. Here advertisers can choose relevant keywords of their choice and, budget permitting, can choose the position of their choice for each one on the search engines. Overture, Google and MIVA are the most common brands for this type of online advertising.
Paid inclusion
Here an advertiser pays to have their site submitted or included in the search engine's editorial listings. Yahoo is one of the most common paid inclusion systems, but Alta Vista, Inktomi, AlltheWeb, and Teoma have paid submission systems for advertisers.
Contextual Ads
This is a somewhat newer form of paid advertising, where the advertiser's message is placed on a page of another website with relevant content.
Travel, Cat Litter and Infidelity
Search Engine Advertising Models
