No other type of advertising performs better on the internet than search engine advertising. Unfortunately, organic search engine advertising is also extremely difficult to master, and generating a webpage that is optimized to work will with major search engines can take months of time, thousands of dollars, or both. Banner and text link advertisements are a dime a dozen, and are exposed so often during a typical session of surfing that most people automatically avoid them, without even thinking about it. When advertisers talk about banner impressions, they talk about click through rates in terms like cost per thousand impressions, or cost per million impressions. Those terms alone should indicate that unless your banners are generating thousands and thousands of impressions fairly regularly, it is going to be difficult to achieve much success relying on them alone for your promotion needs.

Luckily, there is another way to generate traffic for your webpage which is just as simple as placing banner and text advertisements and much more effective. This method is known as pay per click advertising, and continues to grow in popularity. Most people have seen pay per click advertisements, even if they don't know what they are. Typically, pay per click advertisements appear in major search engine listings as the “sponsored links”. These are the links that appear on the very top of the page or on the sidebar off to the right hand side. Google and Yahoo both have programs in place allowing advertisers to place their pay per click ads on relevant web pages, not just search engine listings. If, for instance, you have a website devoted to selling used vehicles, the Google advertising program would allow a pay per click advertiser to list his vehicle related advertisements on your car site. His vehicle related advertisements would not appear on sites unrelated to cars, and your website devoted to selling used vehicles would only display relevant advertisements from Google.

This type of advertising is known as contextual advertising, and means that only relevant ads will appear on relevant websites within the advertising network. The beauty of this system for the advertiser is that he or she only pays money when their ad is actually clicked, hence the name pay per click advertising. This allows an advertiser to get their webpage listed in the major search engines and on relevant web sites very quickly, and since they only pay for advertising that is actually clicked on, it is very cost effective as well. Recently several search engines have launched pay per click services in an attempt to grab a share of the multi million dollar pay per click advertising industry. There are several advantages to signing up with one of the smaller search engines when considering a pay per click advertising campaign. The first and most important reason is price. Many smaller pay per click search engines have far lower rates for identical keywords as the larger engines.

It's not uncommon to find keywords on Google that are priced at $1 or more per click to get into the top few positions. These exact same keywords are significantly less on the smaller search engines, affording you the opportunity to deliver much higher numbers of visitors to your site for the same cost. One drawback of the smaller engines is the amount of traffic. With most people searching on the major search indexes, these major engines will naturally be receiving the lion's share of traffic, so it might take a little longer to generate an equivalent number of visitors when utilizing the smaller engines. However, the significant savings in terms of price per visitor can outweigh the somewhat longer time it takes to generate the traffic.

Overall, pay per click search engines are a great way to deliver highly targeted traffic to your site in a very short amount of time, and without the headache of trying to optimize your site. The smaller engines, due to their decreased cost, are a great way to test out your keyword campaign and web site conversion statistics before moving up to the increased traffic and keyword cost of the major pay per click search engines.