If you currently have a Web site, then I’m sure you are inundated with spam offering “guaranteed placement on more than 5,000 search engines.”

Before we go any further, let me just make something very clear. Yes, there may be 5,000 search engines out there – heck, at this point there may be as many as 50,000 – but there are only four that really matter. If you have your Web site listed highly on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL, then you have pretty much covered most of the search engine marketing you will ever need, because those four engines account for 90 percent of all daily searches.

Your first job as a Web site marketer is to get the best placement you can on the Big Four, and the only way to benefit from these listings is to rank highly. If you are listed in the top three pages on these search engines you will definitely get a lot of traffic. Recent studies have shown that 80 percent of Web users don’t search beyond the first three pages on most engines.

But what if you can’t optimize your site well enough to rank highly? Maybe you don’t have the time or don’t know how to create pages that are attractive to search engine spiders. Or maybe your industry is just too competitive. Don’t worry. You can still grab your share of search engine traffic by paying for placement.

Paid placement is generally divided into fixed placement and pay-for-placement (P4P), which sound alike but are actually a bit different from one another. With both of these methods you choose keywords you wish to target and the maximum price you are willing to pay, and then you submit your listings and wait for them to go live. The biggest difference between the two products is the length of placement and ranking control. With fixed placement, your listing will stay in the position for the price per keyword you choose, but with P4P you are part of a dynamic auction bidding system that will only guarantee your placement until someone outbids you. Fixed placement is currently available on only a few engines. However, pay-for-placement listings are available on all of the major engines listed above. So, depending on your budget, you too can buy your way to the top of these search engines.

In fixed placement, the price may be set on a cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-impression (CPM) or cost-per-action (CPA) basis depending on the deal you are able to strike with the search engine. These listings generally guarantee you a ranking at the top of the search results page either as a “featured site” (on MSN) or a “recommended site” (on AOL). This is very attractive to larger advertisers as the campaign is fairly easy to manage, but requires a large budget commitment up front before you can even tell what your results might be from that particular engine.

Test the Waters

An easier way to test the waters before committing to a large fixed placement campaign is to pay for placement using one of the many CPC opportunities currently available. By listing your site on Google’s Adwords program, or Overture through Precision Match, you will gain top placement on Google and AOL (through Adwords) and MSN and Yahoo (through Precision Match).

With these programs, you choose the keywords you want to submit, write your ad copy (title and description) and submit it to the search engines using their submission forms. If you are struggling to write the copy, you can use Overture’s Fast Track program, where for $199 a member of the Overture team will select keywords and write the listings for you. Your placement on Google is determined by a combination of the amount you are willing to pay-per-keyword (maximum bid) and your ad’s clickthrough rate. With Overture your placement is determined by your maximum bid. Both of these campaigns will place you within the “Sponsored Listings” section of results on the larger search engines, and both require your listing to comply with their editorial guidelines.

There’s a few more things you need to know about buying listings. Before determining how much you can pay per click you need to figure out your marketing plan. Set your maximum bids based on your profit margin, the return on investment you seek, and the maximum CPA you can afford. An easy way to kill your business is to assume that because your competitor can afford a certain maximum bid you can too. The leaders in paid placement marketing set their bids based on their own metrics, not their competitors’.

Tracking your results helps you determine where the qualified buyers are coming from. At the very least, use the free tools offered by Overture and Google when setting up P4P campaigns to track conversions from these engines. And if you plan to make paid placement a long-term part of your marketing strategy, buy a good tracking solution. Add tracking URLs to every paid search campaign you run, and religiously review the reports generated by the tracking software, adjusting your bids based on your results (for a quick tutorial on tracking URLs, check out the Overture advertiser center).

The way you write your copy for your paid search listings can have a huge impact on the success of your campaign. The most effective way to write your listings is to keep in mind the following:

  • 1. Appeal to your customers;
  • 2. State your value proposition;
  • 3. Use a “call to action”; and
  • 4. Include your keywords.

    • If you keep these basic rules in mind, you too can get your business top ranking on the engines without all the time-consuming tactics that search engine optimization requires. There are other ways in which you can buy placement that we will cover in future columns, and we’ll also dive into the tactics that can give you a competitive edge in search engine marketing. See you at the top!

    MARY O’BRIEN is a partner at Traffic Mentor.net. She has worked in Internet marketing for the past five years and was formerly senior director of sales at Overture.com.