Pay Per Click

With roughly one quarter of the "organic" traffic pay per click advertising should be seen more as an adjunct to rather than as an alternative to SEO.

Since PPC allows the usual rules of "search engine friendly" to be safely ignored it can be an advantage to use special PPC "dedicated" pages. The copy/design can be continuously tweaked to improve conversion rates, and these pages can carry specific tracking Urls that would normally fail the "SEF" test.

The main players in PPC are Google AdWords, Yahoo and MSN AdCentral with AW by far the most popular with both a wider reach and better management tools.

The other advantages pay per click has are:

Costs: start-up costs can be quite reasonable.
Immediate Results : unlike with SEO traffic can start from day one.
Highly measurable: ROI is measurable from the start rather than weeks/months down the line.
Flexibility: can take advantage of sudden changes in topical subjects, is perfect for holiday sales or time limited offers and can be shut off instantly if problems arise.
Testing: useful for doing keyword research and for testing landing page copy.

Cost is the main disadvantage of promoting a site with PPC, bids for competitive keywords can become quite high while click fraud rates can vary greatly between the various services.

Back "in the day" PPC used to be quite basic and was often lumped in with SEO, but with its increasing sophistication it's now an area that warrants its own specialists.

For further reading on PPC we recommend: