Introduction

Based on its recent share price, pay per click search engine, Google, now has a stock market capitalization of about $107 billion, more than the combined stock values of stalwarts like Boeing, Ford Motor and General Motors! Its closest pay per click search engine rival Yahoo! has a market capitalization of about $45 billion. So what's so good about these pay per click search engines that has catapulted them in the Fortune list of America's most admired companies?

To get to the root, you first need to understand the pay per click search engine programs. Even though Google AdSense and Yahoo! Search Marketing Solutions, like many PPC programs, are plagued by claims of click fraud; they are clearly an effective revenue source for many reputable web businesses. Publishers or webmasters insert a java script into their web site. Each time the page is accessed or displayed, the java script pulls advertisements from these programs. These ads are targeted and related to the content contained on the web page serving the ad. Google seems to be well content oriented and uses your meta description and meta keywords, in addition to page content, in order to serve up ads that are appropriate to the subject matter of the web site.

At its most basic level, advertisers do not pay anything for the ads displayed until someone actually clicks on them and gets redirected to the advertisers' website. Thus, advertisers are paying-per-click for potential customers who have actually arrived at their websites. This concept of pay-per-click has been around ever since evolution of the Internet and the rise of search engines. However, this type of online advertising in its current form began in 1997, when an entrepreneur named Bill Gross developed an idea for the first-ever pay per click search engine GoTo.com.

Conclusion

What has happened in the search-engine marketing arena over the last couple of years, is a paradigm shift from the traditional means of online advertising to a previously less-employed option called pay-per-click advertising. Because pay-per-click (PPC) has plenty of advantages, and only few shortcomings, many more companies are beginning to experiment with this type of advertising, thus fueling its growth. The introduction of localized search to the mix is the decisive, convincing factor that further sways small and medium businesses to consider this form of online advertising. I myself have gotten plenty of leads and made sales due to pay-per-click advertising on the Google search engine.