What is Search Engine Advertising?

Part 1 of 3: Boosting Sales with Search Engine Advertising

According to Wikipedia (the free online encyclopedia), Search Advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on webpages (especially search engines) based on specific characteristics of the viewer. These could include search words entered by the viewer, as well as geographic location or profile of the viewer.

To break this down a little more – Search Engine Advertising is placing online classified ads where people are actually looking for your product or service. It’s like discovering which newspaper subscribers are interested in the widget you sell and only paying to have your ad in the newspapers delivered to those specific houses.

There are several search engines out there that provide this service, calling it search advertising or (more commonly) pay-per-click advertising. I believe that Google originated this type of advertising, followed by Yahoo and MSN Search. If you look at the picture, you will see regular search engine listings with “sponsored ads” across the top and “search advertising” down the right-hand side.

If you only had to pay for ads being delivered to prospects specifically seeking your product or service, how would it impact your marketing budget? Can you imagine the return on invested marketing dollars?! What form of advertising are you doing now? Comment below and get feedback from us on converting current efforts to search engine marketing or get answers to questions about search engine marketing.

NEXT TIME: How to Setup a Search Engine Advertising Campaign

I Wish to Register a Complaint! SPAM & Junk Mail Griping

Last week, I was bombarded by 100's of SPAM messages disguised as "Returned Mail - Recipient Not Found". Every one of them had a SPAM advertisement for God knows what attached. This is one of those things that really ticks me off!!! How about you?

Like intelligent people are going to buy fake watches, penis pills, and dirt-cheap (but legal - I swear) software from a company that uses SPAM methods to reach us. Get a life SPAM-ers!

I have a few tips for those of you who don't like SPAM either:

1. Do not use a "catch-all" on your email server. A "catch-all" directs any email that does not have a valid email address on your server and sends it to the "catch-all" email address. Almost none of my hosting clients have "catch-all" settings, for those of you that are not hosted with me, you may consider contacting your hosting supplier.

2. Use a Junk Filter. Either on your web server, we offer SPAM Assassin on our server at no additional cost, or on your email program. Outlook gets updates for its Junk Filters every month or so.

3. Never, ever leave your email address "laying around". That is to say, do not list your email address on your website - you may consider have a link that reads "Email Us" with your email address as the link (mailto:joe@joesco.com). SPAMers have programs that read website looking for email addresses - they call this "harvesting".

Fight back against SPAM!!! I found an awesome bit of code on a website that hates SPAM too. You may have noticed the No SPAM graphic on our website (at the bottom left). When a "harvester" reads my site, the program reads that link and is taken to a page of nonsense email addresses. This adds tons of non-existent email addresses to their database, wasting their time (like they do ours) and junking up their email list. Can I get an Oh Yeah!!! Get your No SPAM code and fight back with me.

What are you doing to fight SPAM? Prevent junk email?