What is Pay Per Click (PPC)?

A:  Pay Per Click marketing is where you pay a system such as Google AdWords for clicks to your site.

When you publish a website or blog, it's a long and involved process to get to the top of the search engine results (SERPs) organic rankings.  Many factors come into play:  the number of other sites that link to you, keywords, domain extensions, etc.

Even when you have nailed down all of these factors, you might still be sitting on page 27 of Google, wondering why no one is never clicking on your site.

But pay per click, or PPC, lets you bypass most of those problems.  Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft AdCenter are the top three PPC systems available to online marketers.

Why Use PPC?

Pay per Click is more of a "known quantity" than the organic results.  Because advertisers are paying for the privilege of showing up on search pages, the PPC systems try to be fairly transparent about the process--or at least transparent relative to how the organic results work.

Also, online marketers can appear quickly on search pages, instead of waiting for many weeks for their pages to get "spidered" and recognized by the search engines for the organic results.

A Very Short History of PPC

When PPC first came around, invented by a technology incubator called IdeaLab, it truly was pay per click.  Online marketers could literally pay their pay to the top of search engine rankings.

Yahoo! bought out the IdeaLab product (which was called Overture) and further developed the idea.  But it wasn't until Google developed its own PPC system that it really took off.

Google introduced new ideas that improved the quality of ads and advertisers.  AdWords began to factors in other aspects such as ad copy relevance that helped determine how high an ad ranked.  No longer could online marketers simply "buy their way" to the top.

Yahoo!, ever the imitator, revamped their system under the working title of Panama--mirroring AdWords. 

Microsoft AdCenter is a highly regarded PPC system.  Its interface is considered to be clear and user-friendly, but the MSN's low traffic prevents a lot of online marketers from using AdCenter.