The holiday shopping season has a beginning, middle, and end. You can argue it begins in September and ends in January. No matter what time frame you have it’s still a finite period during which a very large percentage of yearly retail sales are made. You have to strike while the iron is hot! It is unrealistic to expect users to locate your website by directly entering your domain name. More than 75 percent of Internet consumers use search engines and directories to look for products, services and information.

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The problem is it takes time to optimize your website and for spiders to magically index your site in relation to the billions and billions of other websites. The question is how do you get people to your website for that brief three or four month selling season. Answer: you buy your way in.

Pay per click (PPC) search engines, also known as pay-for-performance, are engines which allow website owners to determine their sites ranking in that particular search engines results by bidding on keywords. Usually the first three to five search results are used by a network of partner search sites. The result for the site owner or webmaster is a lot more highly targeted traffic and a lot more sales.

Pay-per-click advertising has a small setup fee, and higher recurring costs than Search Engine Optimization (SEO). However, while SEO can take months or longer to build traffic, PPC will immediately send targeted traffic to your website. You may pay more for the convenience of instantly turning your traffic on and off, but to many it is worthwhile.

Pay-per-click advertising allows you to effectively connect with customers searching online for your products and services. You select words that relate to your business and your website appears in search results on selected sites when search users enter those words. You pay for each sales lead, not each impression, leading to a high return on your advertising investment. You also control your costs by determining the price you are willing to pay per lead – the more you pay, the higher your listings appear within the search results and the greater the number of potential customers that see your listing. The underlying idea to pay per click search engines is that you find keywords related to your website and then you bid on these keywords and buy high positions on your chosen engine. Your bid amount is the amount you’re willing to pay for each visitor that visits your site through the search results.