Pay Per Click Overview

Pay per click (PPC)

is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid onkeyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Pay Per Click Promotion is the most cost effective method for driving targeted traffic to your site. You can control how much a visitor costs. You pay a certain amount for each time a pay per click search engine sends you a visitor. 
Most strategic advertising in the web
Performance based
Pay Per Click visitors are not random people clicking on just any web site. The Pay Per Click search engine provides them with information about your online business before they click. In short, you will receive only visitors who are really interested in what YOU have to offer.

Importance:

fast result
campaigns are easy to create
see results in just days
flexible
fast turn around
accountable
will able to reduce your cost per acquisition and increase your return on investment

How anchor text boosts your search engine rankings

Anchor text is the hyperlinked words on a web page - the words you click on when you click a link.

Here's an example, reciprocal links, in which "reciprocal links" is the anchor text.

Anchor text usually gives your visitors useful information about the content of the page you're linking to.

Here's why anchor text is so important...

It tells search engines what the page is about. Used wisely, it boosts your rankings in search engines, especially in Google.

If you use "click here" as the words people are going to click on, you're telling people the page is about the subject "click here". If you use "Part 2" as the anchor text, your telling the search engines the page is discussing "part 2".

You wouldn't want to rank highly for "click here" or "Part 2".

Anchor text is so important that it's possible for a page to appear in the top 10 in Google's search results for a phrase which isn't mentioned anywhere on the page.

Some blog publishers have fun using "Google bombing" to get pages ranked highly for humorous phrases. If the phrase is obscure, only a handful of links will win the phrase a No.1 ranking. If it's highly competitive, hundreds or thousands of links might be needed.

[UPDATE: In January, 2007, Google created a new algorithm which reduced the impact of many prank Google bombs, but anchor text is still very important.]

When asking other sites to link to your site, it's a good idea to provide them with the HTML code ready to cut and paste into their page. That way, you choose the anchor text.

However, if your site is all about purple widgets, you don't want only "purple widgets" to be used as the phrase in every link to your site. Over-optimizing like that would create an unnatural pattern.

You can use anchor text in:

* External links - links from other sites
* Internal links - links on your pages
* Navigation maps
* Links on your main page. A very important spot.


Remember that real live humans will read your links as well as search engines, so the words in your anchor text need to make sense!

What's Next After Web 2.0

As the world financial crisis has gotten gradually worse over the past few weeks, I've been pondering what this means for the Web. ReadWriteWeb as a publication focuses on technology - web products and trends - rather than business and VC happenings. So with the exception of one of our feature writers Bernard Lunn, who has written a number of great posts on how entrepreneurs can survive this period, we've generally kept out of the Credit Crisis discussion thus far.

But we're clearly now at a point where the financial problems of the world will have a big impact on where Web Technology is headed. Indeed, it looks like we've arrived at one of those giant inflexion points - where one Web era is usurped by another.

Of course this last happened when Web 2.0 was coined by O'Reilly Media in about 2004. Luckily not long before that ReadWriteWeb was born (early 2003). So ReadWriteWeb has been documenting Web 2.0 ever since. Over the past couple of years, we've been focusing on other, perhaps more meaningful, trends - Semantic Web, recommendation technologies, web sites becoming web services, Mobile Web and more.

Anchor Text

Anchor text is highlighted words on a page that link to another web page or resource. Clicking on the text, called hypertext, loads the linked resource in the user's browser. Links are created using the Hypertext Mark-up Language's (HTML) anchor element:
   
This is a hyperlink

The hypertext is the text that occurs between the angle brackets. It would generally appear as: This is a hyperlink in a web browser such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla.
The word hypertext was coined by Ted Nelson who, in the 1960s designed the first ever hypertext system called project Xanadu. Nelson was inspired by a 1945 essay by Vanneva Bush titled: As We May Think. In it Bush envisaged a machine where the user could navigate a non-linear path through a trail of documents linked by concepts represented by words or phrases.

While anchor text tells a search engine nothing directly about the contents of the linked page it is used as a convenient heuristic. A heuristic is a rule of thumb that is normally effective in dealing with a given situation but does not absolutely guarantee the desired results. They are shortcuts where a much more detailed and complicated analysis would otherwise be necessary.

In this case the heuristic is to let humans evaluate the content of the target page. The anchor text should then represent in some way the contents of that page. You can think of it as a vote for your page with those keywords. In an ideal world it should be possible to build quite an effective search engine using anchor text alone. Indeed Oliver McBryan who first proposed the idea at the World Wide Web conference in 1994 used this method on his search engine, the WWW Worm.

There are a couple of pitfalls. Firstly many interesting and useful web pages don't have relevant inbound-links.  Secondly SEO experts can use this knowledge to subvert a search engine to favor their pages by creating inbound links for popular keyword from other sites under their control. This is a form of search engine spam.

Web Page Optimization

There are aspects of the optimization process that gain and lose importance. Content optimization is no exception to this. Through the many algorithm changes that take place each year, the weight given to the content on your pages rises and falls. Currently incoming links appear to supply greater advantage than well-written and optimized content.

The goal for anyone following this series is to build and optimize a website that will rank well on the major search engines and, more difficult and far more important, hold those rankings through changes in the search engine algorithms. While currently having a bunch of incoming links from high PageRank sites will do well for you on Google you must consider what will happen to your rankings when the weight given to incoming links drops, or how your website fares on search engines other than Google that don’t place the same emphasis on incoming links.

While there are many characteristics of your content that are in the algorithmic calculations, there are a few that consistently hold relatively high priority and thus will be the focus of this article. These are:

1. Heading Tags
The heading tag (for those who don’t already know) is code used to specify to the visitor and to the search engines what the topic is of your page and/or subsections of it. You have 6 predefined heading tags to work with ranging from H1 to H6.

2. Special Text (bold, colored, etc.)
“Special text” (as it is used here) special is any content on your page that is set to stand out from the rest. This includes bold, underlined, colored, highlighted, sizing and italic. This text is given weight higher than standard content and rightfully so.

3. Inline Text Links
Inline text links are links added right into text in the verbiage of your content.

4. Keyword Density
It is the percentage of your total content that is made up of your targeted keywords.