If you’ve set up your website so it’s easy for both customers and search engines to read but are still not happy with your search ranking, you might want to consider paying for advertising online. These days, the most common form of online advertising is known as pay per click (PPC) advertising.

With pay per click advertising, advertisers bid on keywords they think their customers will use when searching for products or services. When a customer searches using a keyword on the advertiser’s list, or visits a page with content that matches the keyword, the advertiser’s ad may be shown.

These ads are called ‘sponsored links’ or ‘sponsored ads’ and usually appear above or beside the normal results on search engine result pages. To see this in action, type a search query like ‘carpets’ into Google and look for the sponsored links. They appear above and to the right of the normal search results and are identified by a coloured background.

What you spend on pay per click advertising is up to you, but since businesses bid on similar words it’s a good idea to set a budget for what you are willing to pay for each keyword.

via Business Victoria – Starting and Managing a Business – Promoting Your Website.