“Pay Per Click” is a term that will have an ever-increasing place in your overall Web strategy. Simply put, it means that your site’s ranking in search engines that follow this practice depends on how much you pay the search engine each time a viewer clicks on your listing. You deposit a certain amount of money with a search engine, and each time a viewer clicks through to your site money is deducted from your account. The higher your “bid” (what you’re willing to pay per click through), the higher you’re ranked on that search engine.

This practice is most visible on Overture.com, formerly GoTo.com. A search for “real estate Chicago,” for example, brought up Fsboni.com as the first site. After the site link were these words: “Cost to advertiser: $1.27.” This means that the site owner pays Overture.com $1.27 cents every time a viewer clicks through to his or her listing. If you want to be ranked above this site, you’d bid $1.28.

Realtor Lewis Walker explains, "Overture.com raised the minimum bid March 1st to $.05, but if you had an existing account you could maintain a less than .05 bid as long as you keep the account active. Most likely attract search terms will cost more than a nickel anyway. Once you have an account, you can add search terms and bid for them. Overture.com sends you a monthly report that provides information on which search terms you have contracted for in which people clicked through. You can also go to their site and search for the most searched terms and bid on those if you like. I have used their service since September 1999, and it has tripled my traffic from search engines.

"Overture.com has alliances with Metacrawler, Lycos, Dogpile and HotBot. Recently, I have noticed that my ratings have shot up at AOL and MSN, attributable to Overture.com. You can see I'm sold on it, and my average bill is $60 per month."

Overture.com is the most obvious example of this relatively new practice, but it doesn’t stop there. There is also “Pay Inclusion.” This means that you pay to get listed in a search engine’s results for relevant topics.

These two practices will affect your placement on all search engines to a greater degree in the time ahead. Overture.com, for instance, syndicates its service to thousands of other search engine services. Other search engines, such as AltaVista and Lycos, now have “sponsored links” and “featured listings,” which means that these sites pay for favored placement. Yahoo!, while not promoting ranking, does have a fee to expedite your inclusion on their site.

What does this mean to you? Three things:

1. You are going to have to devote an increasing share of your marketing budget to site promotion if you want high rankings in the search engines

2. You need to keep abreast of how these practices affect your placement in search engines

3. Now, more than ever, you need to pay particular attention to the method that works best for getting visitors to your site: personal promotion.

With regards to the third item: this, more than search engine placement, is your most effective way to get visitors to your site, based on research I’ve done with top agents nationwide. These agents pay attention to search engine placement, often hiring an individual to work on that aspect of their business, but they realize that featuring your site on your business card, on all printed material, on all promotional items, on yard signs, on moving trucks, on their car and in their real estate magazine ads pays off far more handsomely than does a high ranking in a search engine.

That said, remember that you need to be formulating your site placement strategy based on the new developments.

Realtor Roger Lundy received 132 click-throughs on 11 key words for just $6.60 on Overture.com.

"The monthly minimum is $20, and they charge you that even if you don't get the clicks," says Lundy. "I just raised my bid on “indianapolis homes" and "indianapolis real estate" to make sure I spend the whole $20 on clicks."

The “pay per click” ploy for search engines, then, is worth paying attention to. It’s here today, and it will be even more of a factor in your overall marketing strategy in the months ahead.

Published: January 28, 2002

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

Allen F. Hainge is a nationally known real estate technology speaker and author with a difference: he builds his seminars and articles around concrete, practical experiences he learns from his CyberStars(tm), a group of top agents nationwide who use today's technology to dominate their marketplace. He is the author of "Dominate! Capturing Your Market With Today's Technology." Allen's seminar schedule and offerings may be found www.afhseminars.com. Subscribe to Allen's Newsletter by Clicking Here