What is the Deal With Pay-Per-Click (PPC)?

Some Search Engines offer Pay-per-Click and Paid Inclusion services. Yahoo!/Overture and Google AdWords are currently the most popular paid inclusion services. Pay Per Click allows you to bid for top placement in their results. In this scenario, the top placement for a particular search term goes to the highest bidder; the next spot goes to the next highest, and so on. Each time a user clicks on your site via the engine, you pay the price that you bid. The higher you bid, the higher you're listed. This allows you to directly control where you show up in the search results.

Other Paid Inclusion services such as AskJeeves require you to pay a certain fee in order to be included in that service's results. This guarantees that you are listed under that site's directory, and that your site is "crawled" by their spiders on a more regular basis, allowing your site updates to be picked up more frequently. It does not guarantee exactly where you will show up in results.

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