The behind-the-scenes guide to search engine advertising.

Search Engine Back Door Guide

Due to recent changes in the search engine industry, there are now powerful 'back doors' into the major search engines. Understanding these back doors can give you a major edge over your competition and drive a tremendous amount of traffic to your web site.

Achieving top search engine rankings is extremely difficult. Here's why. Search engines present the results of every search in 'relevancy' sequence. They evaluate thousands of web sites, assign them a relevancy value and display them in sequence, most-relevant sites first. The problem? Each search engine calculates 'relevancy' differently. Each has a set of rules (an algorithm) which considers dozens of factors and assigns specific weights to them. To rank higher than other web sites on a given search, your site would have to 'look better' to that engine's algorithm than the other sites. Not easy, since algorithms are tightly-guarded secrets.

Web site owners looking to increase their rankings face a difficult choice....

1. They could try to figure out how each search engine works, in effect, become search engine experts. This might involve days, weeks, even months of research and experimentation - making individual changes to their web sites, running searches, judging the results, then repeating the process. While an option for very technical webmasters, this method has a number of obvious pitfalls...

• It is extremely time consuming. Webmasters can spend months of experimentation trying to "crack" a given search engine algorithm, with no guarantee for success.
  
  
• Algorithms are changed frequently. Even if high rankings are achieved, it is difficult to maintain those rankings, because search engines change their algorithms every few months.
  
  
• And worst of all, the possibility of being banned altogether:
  

  Search engines have started to actively discourage certain aggressive techniques used to increase rankings. Webmasters who use these techniques risk having their sites banned from a search engine. Once banned, it can be very difficult to get unbanned. Many webmasters have been forced to 'start over' with a new domain name, and start rebuilding their web site's reputation from scratch.

  
  
  
  

2. They could hire someone to increase their search engine rankings, but picking a good search engine optimization expert can be very difficult. Experts are worth their weight in gold, but there are many non-experts out there who claim to be experts - and it can be very difficult to tell them apart. These pseudo-experts can often do more harm than good. Some tips on selecting an expert...

Be wary of services that promise to submit your site to 'thousands of search engines'. Not much of a promise. Anyone can 'submit' a web site to a search engine, and there are only ten or so major search engines worth being listed on. The trick is being aware of the complex factors that influence search engine rankings and optimizing a web site accordingly. Be careful who you trust. Some inexperienced or unscrupulous search engine services use techniques that can get your web site permanently banned. Steer clear of 'link farms', 'keyword-stuffing', 'meta-tag loading', 'invisible pixels' and submission to 'free-for-all sites'.

3. They could give up on search engine rankings and turn to banner ads. Frustrated by their inability to achieve significant search engine rankings, many web site owners resort to 'banner campaigns', which often turn out to be overpriced and ineffective. These campaigns are usually pricey (a $5000 minimum is not uncommon). Banner industry pricing is based on 'cost-per-thousand impressions' (called CPM). A search engine charging $30 CPM, will display your banner 1000 times for $30.

Unfortunately, not many people click on banners. A banner click-thru rate of .25% (1 person out of 400) is not uncommon. At that rate, displaying a banner 2000 times would bring only 5 new visitors. The cost... $12 a visitor. Not very good!

Banner ads were extremely popular in the booming dot-com goldrush days. Lots of money was spent and few companies monitored their return on advertising investment. When these companies ran out of money or realized their advertising wasn't paying off, they dropped banner ads. But there were usually new wide-eyed companies ready to take their place.

The goldrush days are over now, the economy has tightened and savvy companies are paying more attention to their return on advertising investment. Advertisers are turning away from overpriced banner ads and there are no new wide-eyed companies waiting to take their place. That's bad news for the search engines, but...

Good news for web site owners

Faced with diminishing banner revenue and click-thru rates, search engines have had to adapt. Most now have special arrangements with pay-per-click (PPC) search engines to display PPC search results on their 'results' pages. Many people don't notice it, but when they do a search on most major search engines...

They may be labeled 'sponsored' or 'featured' and they come from PPC searches. They are 'back doors' to these search engines, a way to easily appear prominently on search result pages.

What is a Pay Per Click Search Engine?

A pay per click search engine is a search engine that allows advertisers to bid on individual keyword phrases. Search results are ranked according to bid, not relevancy. For any keyword search, the highest bidder is listed first, followed by the second highest, and so on.

Pay per click search engines have a number of advantages over traditional banner advertising.

Text vs. banner - Most PPC search engines display a 'text ad' containing a description of your site and your URL. Since text ads are more likely to be perceived as information than flashy banner ads, they generally achieve much higher click-thru rates.

Pay only for actual visitors - PPC search engine charges are based on people clicking on your text ad and getting to your web site. If you are bidding 10 cents on a keyword, you know with certainty that you will be able to receive 100 visitors to your site for a fixed cost of ten dollars. Standard banner campaign charges are based on the number of times your banner is displayed, with no guarantee that you will receive even one visitor.

Highly targeted - Since you can bid on individual keyword phrases and only pay for visitors that click thru to your site, you can advertise to an extremely targeted audience. For example, a Florida realtor specializing in townhouses in Orlando can advertise specifically to those searching for 'orlando townhouses'. Since this is the realtor's ideal audience, the visitors that click thru are much more likely to be interested in his services.

Low cost, low risk, quick startup - Unlike traditional banner advertising, PPC minimums are very low. Most PPC engines require only $25 to get started and the cost-per-click usually starts at 5 to10 cents. There are no long term contracts (as there are with banner campaigns) and some PPC programs offer instant activation. In most cases, you can be receiving new visitors within several days.

To repeat the good news...

Because major search engines now display pay-per-click search engine listings on their 'results' pages, sometimes ABOVE their own 'relevant' search results, they have created a 'back door' to their searches. It is now possible to buy your way to the top of these search engines for very little money.

By being aware of these 'back doors', your web site can be listed above hundreds of competing sites who have not yet discovered pay-per-click advertising.

This web site was created to continually track the individual pay-per-click 'back doors' for each search engine. We analyze the results page of each major search engine and show exactly where the 'featured' listings appear, which listings are displayed and from what pay per click search engine they come.

The easiest way to get started is to use our free pay-per-click back door finder.

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