Having developed a website and uploaded it to a host, your site will now be live and waiting ready for your first visitors. Websites differ from bricks and mortar businesses in one major way. A bricks and mortar business, if well positioned, will get passing traffic. Being inquisitive, some of this passing traffic will wonder in to have a look. Websites can’t receive passing traffic. You have to go out and find it.

A good search engine optimization program will help your site climb the search results pages. This can take time, perhaps months. You can try and speed things up a little by using a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising program.

Pay-per-click is one of the most popular forms of advertising on the internet. All the Google ads you see on websites and along side the search results are PPC ads. You can set up an advertising program through Google or Yahoo! or many other places. You set a daily budget and an upper limit on the per click cost. This upper limit will determine how often and where your ads are placed.

Pay-per-click can be good for initial traffic. It can also be expensive if you are in a highly competitive niche. Other forms of advertising include banner ads where you pay a set price for a set number of impressions. You can also find related sites and buy advertising space in much the same way you would in a newspaper. Instead of buying by-the-day, you would pay for your banner to be displayed by the month.

Over the longer term, search engines produce the best value traffic – its free, so long as your site is optimized carefully. One of the major keys to gaining a good rank in the search engines is by developing incoming links to your site. There are a number of ways to develop inbound links and these will be discussed in the next part of this series.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 30th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under PPC, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.