Let's look at advertising from days gone by. No matter the medium for your advertising, TV, radio, newsprint, or web-page, you would be charged a fee. And for your fee you'd get you ads shown for a particular time period and they could be seen by any, and everybody.

Then somebody got to thinking and decided that this way of doing it was not quite fair for the internet; because not every ad medium has the same benefits. They also figured that if ads got a lot of viewings because the webpage it was showing on had a lot of net surfers come each day, then why not have both the page owner and the advertiser gain from that fact.

Raising the fee for advertising wouldn't really work either, because if extra business didn't continue, that might hurt the sites reputation.

Hence: the birth of the concept of pay per click advertising.

Ads are written by the marketer, using keywords chosen for their productivity, for a product/service they would like to sell. Then the marketer gives these ads to the search engine.

Each time someone searches on the web for a particular keyword the search engine will display the ad. When the ad is clicked on and the searcher goes from the ad to the website linked to the ad, the advertiser pays the search engine a small fee, usually under a dollar, and it is good business for the search engine and the advertiser.

The search-engines also took it a little further and let an advertiser who will pay more money per click to have their ads displayed on the top of the heap, thus receiving greater opportunity for viewing and greater quantities of traffic, and hopefully greater profits for the advertiser as well as the search engine.

If you ask anyone to identify a pay per click "ppc" advertising tool they are probably going to immediately fall back on Google and Google AdWords; however, Google is far from the only search engine to operate a pay per click marketing tool.

Yahoo!, ABC Search, Search Feed, 7 Search, MIVA, Findology, Microsoft AdCenter and Ask.com, are less well known search engines that have ppc advertising services. With these alternatives to Google Adwords, marketers can test their advertising mettle and reap the profits found them.