One of the best possibilities to drive targeted traffic to your web site is the use of Pay-Per-Click search engines . They are not like the regular search engines where you have to deal with meta-tags, alt-tags, robots.txt etc. for your web pages.

With this kind of web site promotion, the rankings are solely based on the amount of money you want to spend on your advertising campaign. The advertisers are bidding on certain keywords to achieve a particular position at the results page.

If someone searches for that keyword and clicks on the link, the advertiser has to pay the determined amount of money. I've seen actual bids which go as high as $6 to $7 e.g. for the keyword "web hosting" on Overture.com .

Could Your Competitors Click On Your Link ?

But to avoid that your competitors click on your link a thousand times to make you bankrupt, there is a mecha- nism (I think it's done with cookies) which blocks this process .

This also is of interest to the PPCs' operators to serve their customers in this way because many customers would complain and could ask for their money back.

You should not bid for the most competitive keywords as this could easily cost you hundreds of dollars to rank at the top. Try to find keywords which are relevant to your site as well but which are less competitive.

Try To Avoid Highly Competitive Keywords

In a nutshell : If your web site has the topic Internet mar- keting, which is highly competetive, try to avoid this key- word by choosing a more specific expression like e.g. copywriting or e-book creation . Then you are rather in a field where competitors pay less for a click.

Make a list of 20-50 keywords which are relevant to your site. Look how many times your keywords have been searched for at the most important pay-per-click search engine Overture.com (former Goto.com) : http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ Then bid for the most promising ones (those with the highest numbers) at Overture.com and some other PPCs .

Don't Bid Too Much For A Keyword

Don't make the mistake to bid too much for a keyword. If you want to reach a number one spot and the highest bid is $0.30 , don't bid $0.50 or higher. Then you are just wasting money, you could have the same top spot if you just paid $0.31 !

About the author: Article by Detlev Reimer. Feel free to use the article with these bylines included. Detlev has just finished creating his first product, a database program for Internet marketers which will help you to save and organize e.g. your advertising, customer and contact data. For further details, please visit : http://www.promobuddy.com/ . Sign up for his newsletter at http://www.internetmarketing-success.com/ .