Pay Per Click search engines are those that allow you to bid on particular keywords and then only pay when a user clicks to follow your link to your site. You control the ranking of your web site since the results are ordered by the bid rate. The results go from the highest bid down. Since you only pay when people click on your link it can be very effective advertising. Of course it is important to target the right keywords to avoid paying for clicks that do not turn into customers at a level appropriate to your cost.

Basically you are advertising your web site by selecting keywords that refer to your product or service. Obviously the most popular keywords cost more. However, when you are targeting the right keywords and have determined a bid rate that equates to an acceptable cost it is risk free advertising.

There are several things to consider when utilizing pay per click advertising:

1. Keyword conversion is critical. As stated in the keyword section section, research shows that people who buy from web sites often found the site using a four to five word keyword phrase. People who use shorter phrases are often just browsing. If you choose too broad of a term you can spend a lot on people that are not your audience.
    
2. Bid gaps can cost you lots of money if not noticed quickly. If you are bidding $.15 per click and the next bid down is $.08 you are paying $.06 more then necessary per click. Multiply this across multiple keywords for several weeks and you could be spending hundreds of dollars needlessly. Managing this process can be a full time job.

Pay per click sites like Overture have become extremely popular with marketers because of their ability to drive targeted traffic that you only pay for when they actually choose to come to your site. However, there is some concern about the future of this model since the results are geared to the amount of money that someone can pay and not towards the actual quality of the site. Results that are driven by the search engine’s desire to increase revenue can leave a sour taste in users’ mouths and has spelled the downfall of more then one search engine in the past.