Making the Most of Paid Placement Search Engines

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By Dan Grossman

Paid placement search engines, ones in which you bid on keyword positions in their search results, are an effective way to get targeted traffic to your Web site at low cost. Unlike normal search engines, the trick to success with these isn't bidding on the right keywords, but bidding on as many relevant keywords as possible. Here's a quick list of the major search engines you can bid on listings at:

http://www.goto.com/
http://www.sprinks.com/
http://www.rocketlinks.com/
http://www.searchhound.com/
http://www.7search.com/
http://www.findwhat.com/
http://www.kanoodle.com/
http://www.brainfox.com/

To achieve success at these search engines without spending your entire advertising budget in a few days is to bid low on many listings. If you take a look at top keywords, companies are placing bids as high as $5 on up for a single visit to their site. To most Web sites paying more than a couple cents per visitor would mean losing money.

If you're interested in knowing just how much a person is worth to your site, use this equation:

Average Monthly Earnings / Average Monthly Unique Visitors Make sure you're using unique visitors and not impressions. Each person may view several pages of your site, so a unique visit from a search engine would be worth more than an impression.

The Keywords

The smarter webmasters will bid a few cents on several hundred or several
thousand keywords relevant to their sites. So how do you find hundreds of keywords to bid on? You can't be expected to think of every single one. There are two great tools you can use to generate several hundred in only a few hours (or sometimes only minutes) of work:

http://www.jimtools.com/keywords.html
http://inventory.go2.com/inventory/Search_Suggestion.jhtml

Using the JimTools tool, you simply choose a search engine, enter a few keywords relevant to your site, choose "a lot" for how many results you want and let the tool do it's work! It will check the meta tags on each site in the results of the chosen search engine and return to you a list of keywords they used in their sites. Using this method, you can easily generate 500 keywords to bid on in an hour or two.

With Goto.com's search term suggestion tool you can also find hundreds of keywords relevant to yours in very little time. By entering a few keywords about your site, the tool returns the most searched for terms at Goto.com with the keywords you entered in them.

Paste the results from these two tools into a text file and use them when bidding on search terms. Most of the pay for placement search engines allow bulk submission through an Excel file, which you can easily paste into from your text file.

The Listings

Now that you've got a list of several hundred keywords prepared for your listings, you need to prepare the rest of the listing. The easiest way is to use your homepage for all the listings so that you only have to write one description, but you could also write a separate one for each major page within your site and assign each page their own keywords.

To increase the clickthroughs on your listings when they turn up in search engine results, your title should catch the visitor's attention. For my own site, I use "WebSiteGoodies - FREE Tools and Resources!" as this title fits the length requirements for most of the search engines, shows what you're going to get at my site, and draws attention to itself. Your description should tell what the person's going to get if they visit the Web site.

Conclusion

The secret to paid placement search engines is to bid on hundreds of relevant keywords. Using the methods above you can have significant traffic to your site at a very low cost.