What are Paid Submissions
There are several major search engines, which can rank your website depending on how much you are prepared to spend with them. The costs to you are normally based on a Pay Per Click system i.e. you pay a fixed amount of money every time someone searches for the keywords that you have "purchased" and clicks on your web site link to visit your website.
You agree to pay a certain amount each time someone clicks on your listing. 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. You are allowed to "bid" on the search words you wish to appear under. The higher the amount you bid the higher your website is ranked when a user searches for your chosen keyword. Some of the major players that provide these services include Overture and Google Adwords.
P aid listings are an alternative to organic Search Engine listings for companies that want to be seen on search engines fast. This is a very controllable way of promoting your web site. You can vary your bid amounts up or down at short notices and have the option to limit how much you are willing to spend each month. The fact that you only pay when someone clicks on your listing means that people can still see you without you paying anything. This can be advantageous to establish your company branding and services.
Let's assume that you wanted to appear in the top paid rankings for the term "taxi Gatwick." You may agree to pay 20p per visitor. If no other company or bidder decides to pay more than this, then you would appear at the top of the paid search results, when someone searched for that term. If another bidder, however, wants to pay 21p, then your position will slip down to the number 2 spot. You would then need to bid 22p to move back to the top of the results.
Not many people go directly to the Overture site to search for results. A majority of people will come across Overture's paid results via the search engines. For example, the highest "taxi Gatwick" listing at Overture would also appear in the "Sponsored Links" section at the top of Yahoo's search results. Details of the Overture listings program can be found at Overture.
If you want visitors to your website instantly, then paid inclusion is a useful option to have. It is not difficult to open a pay per click account and by carefully selecting targeted keywords, you can stretch a small budget for one or two months and get good quality targeted traffic. If you have also implemented a search engine optimisation exercise then after a few months, you should also find that the organic search listings in the search engine directories have also kicked in. If this happens then it means that you can eliminate your pay per click spend.
Google also sells paid listings that appear to the side of its regular search results. It can take time for organic listings to appear within Google so paid inclusions are a good fast way to get listed with the service. On the other hand, although using pay per click is fast and guaranteed it can be time consuming and expensive. For example, a business can end up bidding in excess of £4 for some keywords and it can end up spending in excess of £50,000+, a budget beyond small businesses.
