by Michael Wong

I came across this search engine quite a while ago, but didn't realize the significance of it as a marketing tool until recently. The search engine in question is "Goto.com". So what's so good about Goto.com compared to the hundreds of search engines on the net?

Well, here are some facts about Goto.com.

They only officially launched six months ago - increasing its unique visitor traffic by 600% from May to October. They are the 24th most trafficked web site, with 4.2 million "unique" visitors in October, according to RelevantKnowledge. That's a 64% jump from the month earlier.

The major difference between Goto.com and all the other top search engines is that websites are ranked by the amount they bid for the listing - the more you bid, the higher you're ranked.

I think this system works very well and maybe the way forward for search engines. Websites aren't going to be indexed unless the owners pay for the privilege, and every click-through as a result of their listing costs them money.

This will get rid of the many personal home pages that so often turn up in other search engines. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that these types of websites are a waste of time. But when you are searching for websites with useful information, you don't want to have listings of websites that usually only contain a few quickly put together pages, with no real content at all.

So how do you get 10,000 for $100.00? Well, this is how it works. To be listed in Goto.com, you select a number of keywords that is relevant to your website and make bids for them.

So, let's take us, eBoz.com, as an example. We are targeting people who are interested in information relating to ecommerce, web design or marketing.

The first thing I noticed was their really useful "search for a similar search term" tool. When you enter a keyword it will return with a list of related search terms, along with the number of times it has been requested. It hit me straight away! This was a tool that would alleviate all those problems with trying to think of keywords that people are likely to search for when my site is indexed in the search engines. This great little tool gives me a list of similar keywords and even tells me how popular they are. So even before I signed up with Goto.com, I redid all my keyword meta tags to take into account of the keywords that Goto.com returned, when I entered a keyword. And I suggest you do the same.

Once that was completed, I set about adding my website to their search listing. If you enter in a search, you'll notice that the list of websites returned also displays the cost to the advertiser for the position they are ranked. On each page 40 websites are listed. For "marketing", the cost for the #1 position is $0.45. Now, I'm not willing to pay 45 cents for a visitor to click through to my site. In fact I want to pay as little as possible.

When I looked at the next page of results, I saw that at #68, the cost to the advertiser is only 1 cent. This was the last website listed with a price by its name. The rest of the results are supplied by an outside search engine, Inktomi. So I added "marketing" to my list of keywords at a cost of 1 cent per click-through. I'm now listed on the second page of a "major" search engine, under the keyword I want and it's only costing me 1 cent per click-through. What a bargain! I then did this for a whole list of keywords all with bids of only 1 cent. I might not be #1 under all the keywords, or even on the first page, but at least I'm not listed #135,026!!

So at 1 cent per click-through, $100.00 will buy me 10,000 visitors. Because I'm listed on the second, third, or fourth pages, all 10,000 visitors might take a while for them to arrive, but that's ok with me. The best way around that problem is to be listed under as many relevant keywords as possible. The more obscure or direct search terms in fact cost less. For example, for "online marketing", I can get ranked at #22 bidding 1 cent. Actually, I have only just noticed that writing this article! So I better get onto that one right away.

You could outbid the website at #1 for your keywords. If you found that for every 10 visitors, one made a purchase and you made $10.00 profit as a result. Then, you could bid a lot more than 1 cent. If it cost you 50 cents to be #1, then 10 click-throughs would cost you $5.00. With the above ratio, you'd still make $5.00 profit.

They even offer a list of unbidded popular search terms. So you can make a bid for 1 only cent to be #1!! Their "Top 100 Popular Search Terms List" is also a valuable list of keywords that you can add to your meta tags.

Previously, sites who had bid for the same amount were randomly listed, but they have changed the system to display them on a first-come first-serve basis. So anyone who makes a bid for the same amount after you, will be listed underneath you. This is much fairer system.

Goto.com now provides some 18% of my visitors and I feel it is one of the best marketing avenues for any Web site.