For The Common Hoster’s first post, I wanted to give a basic explanation of a question that I hear quite often.  What is Google AdWords (or Yahoo’s equivalent Yahoo! Sponsored Search)?

What Google, Yahoo, and other search engines are offering can be called Search Engine Marketing, or Pay-Per-Click Advertising.    If you’ve ever searched for something on a search engine, when the results page comes up you will notice that on the top of the page and down the right side are “sponsored results.”  To get your site to show up under sponsored results, you do the following:

First you must open a free account with Google, Yahoo, etc.  Next,   you create an ad and choose keywords and phrases that you would like your site associated with.  Each keyword will have a relative cost based on how often that keyword is typically searched for.  Taking that into consideration, you then tell the search engine how much you’re willing to pay for each “click.”  The more you’re willing to pay, the higher up your ad will appear.  When someone then searches for one of your keywords, they will see your site listed, and you only pay for the advertisement if that user then clicks on your ad.  Hence the term “pay-per-click.”  This is a good way of guranteeing that the money you’re putting in to advertising is resulting in visits to your web site.

Each search engine varies slightly, but there are also some great options available for targeting only people in your geographical area if you are a small business.  For example, if I own a flower shop in Jacksonville, Florida I can tell Google that I only want my advertisement to show up when people within 50 miles of my store search for the word “flowers.”  You can also set daily, weekly, and monthly budgets…so you don’t have to worry about spending more than you can afford.  You’re also provided with all sorts of reporting features so that you can see how effective your advertising has been, and if there are any trends that you can take advantage of.

Lastly, it is important to note that the topic of this post is very different from Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).  SEO involves doing certain things to your site to increase how highly it appears in normal search engine results.  SEO is a very involved topic, and entire books are dedicated to it.  So we won’t dive into it here, but it’s important to know that investing money in Search Engine Marketing won’t improve your rankings on the search engines.

Questions?  Comments?  Email The Common Hoster at jon.blackburn@ecommerce.com