In the previous article we looked at free tools within the website builder webeden.co.uk that you can use to market your website. In this article we're going to be examining the ways to market your website using search engines. One of these methods you have to pay for, and other is usually free. Both are very effective!

Why should I market my Webeden.co.uk website?

The whole point of marketing your website is to send visitors to it. At the end of the day, you have decided to build your own website to showcase your products and services, in the same way a shop window does. If no-one is looking at the shop window, then you're not going to be able to sell any products! Search Engines are the single biggest source of traffic to websites. Over 65% of all journeys on the Internet start with a search. If you market effectively using search engines you will generate lots of traffic, and your website will be a success.

Pay Per Click Search

The most popular and perhaps best known online advertising channel is called Pay Per Click search (PPC). You might also know it as Google Adwords, which is Google's version of PPC. But the other search engines also have their own: Yahoo! has ?Yahoo Search Marketing?, and Microsoft (who run the search engines msn.co.uk and live.com) have ?AdCenter?. Put simply, its those ?sponsored links? that you see running at the top and down the right hand side of the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS). (That's the page that you see after you've typed in your search query and hit ?Search?). We're going to focus here on Google , as in the UK Google accounts for approximately 85% of all Internet searches. Bear this in mind when you make your own website.

In order to appear in these ?sponsored links? on Google, you need to sign up to a Google Adwords account (found at adwords.google.com). You will then be prompted by a ?Sign up wizard? that will guide you through the process of setting up your campaign. The first thing is to choose which keywords that people use when they search for your product. For example, if you sell pens, then you would choose keywords search as ?pens?, ?red pens?, or ?buy pens?, plus many hundreds of other variations.

Once you've chosen your keywords, you then write an advert to appear when people search using your keywords. There are editorial guidelines within your AdWords control panel, but briefly the top line needs to be 25 characters and the other two 35 characters each. You also need to add your website address (like www.webeden.co.uk), and choose the page on your website that you want to send visitors to. For example, if someone has searched for ?buy blue pen? and you have shown them an advert for a ?blue pen?, then link that advert with a page on your website where the user can buy a blue pen. Once all that is done, you decide how much you want to pay each time someone clicks on your advert, and you make the campaign live. Your advert will then start appearing when people search using your keywords, and you pay Google when people click on your advert. The higher up you appear, the more people click on your advert. If you want to appear higher up, you need to increase the amount you are willing to pay each time someone clicks on your advert.

Having gone to the effort of building a website, PPC will probably be your most effective marketing channel.