Paid Advertising

Often, those who launch new web sites want to appear in search engines right away. In these cases, you'll need to budget more money for paid advertising.
Paid listings come in two forms; paid inclusion and pay-per-click.

Paid Inclusion

With paid inclusions, you are paying an extra fee for web crawlers and bots to come to your site in a short period of time (usually within five business days).
This does not guarantee placement or indexing and usually requires a yearly or semi yearly fee. Without purchasing this service, it may take from several weeks to a month for search engines to index and rank your site.

Pay-per-click

When done properly, pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, can be a great investment. However, it can also cost you a lot of money and yield minimal results if done incorrectly.

With pay-per-click, you generally create an account with the search engine you would like to advertise on, then bid on the keywords and phrases you would like. Then, when a person uses the search engine to look for a keyword you have bid on, your site appears in the “sponsored link” section. The order in which it appears depends on the pay-per-click service, how much you bid, and how much the other people that bid on the same phrase have bid.

We will use Google as an example. For Google, you would create an adwords account, and then pick the keyword or phrase that will bring targeted traffic to your site. These should also be the keywords or phrases you have optimized your site for.

You then decide what your limits will be (how much you are willing to spend per day or month, and how much are you willing to bid on your selected words or phrases). If you are in the top eight bids, you will come up on the first page. If you are 9-18, you will be on the second page, and so on.

As the people above you reach the limits they have set and their listing stops running for the day, your listing would move up. Because of this, bidding to be in the top few listings is not always the best way to go.

When using pay-per-click:

• If your main keyword is extremely competitive, consider bidding on a less popular, but still applicable phrase.
• Make sure, when visitors come to your site, that your call to action is clear and applicable to the keywords you have chosen.
  

Offline advertising

Don’t forget to include your website address on all of your company branding. Include your site on your business cards, company letterhead, and in any offline advertising you do (billboards, fliers, TV and radio ads, etc.).

For more information on marketing and managing your website, visit our online tutorials at: http://hitnewsfeeds.com