Pay-Per-Click Advertising & Its Benefits

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising can be a very effective advertising tool while establishing a successful SEO campaign. It is also known as Sponsored Links or Pay Per Click, and drives immediate traffic to your website. It is a method of bringing visitors to your website by using an advertisement for which you have to pay only when someone clicks on the ad to visit your site. The good news is - you only have to pay for those who are interested in your products or services.It is a very successful method of online advertising, developed by Overture (now Yahoo search marketing) and perfected by Google where instead of paying a fee for online advertisements which appear on various websites (banner ads), search engine PPC advertising works on a pay-per-click system, whereby the webmaster only pays the search engine when a user clicks on his ad.

Made popular PPC advertising is by Google.com AdWords system which allows advertisers to place context sensitive advertisements on the search results of the Google search engine and on
other websites that choose to display Google AdWords content in return for income.

Google Adwords are advertisements which are placed on the right or on top of your Google search results page. You can also specify the search terms for which your ad should appear.

Another example is the Yahoo! owned Overture (Yahoo Search Marketing) that also offer sponsored search results on a PPC basis. These two services are the largest PPC systems available however many individual sites also offer similar sponsorship opportunities.With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. When a user a keyword query matching an advertiser's keyword list, or views a webpage with relevant content, the advertisements may be displayed. Such advertisements are called sponsored links or sponsored ads, and appear adjacent to or above the "natural" or organic results on search engine results pages, or anywhere a webmaster or blogger chooses on a content page.

Content websites commonly charge a fixed price for a click rather than use a bidding mechanism.Although many PPC providers exist, Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the largest network operators as of 2007 Minimum prices per click, often referred to as costs per click (CPC), vary depending on the search engine and the level of competition for a particular phrase or keyword.