Keyword-Based Advertising

Keyword-Based Advertising
Many Web sites, including many of the major search engines and Web directories, offer keywordbased advertising. Here’s how it works. You purchase one or more words and/or phrases related to your business. When a customer searches for any of those words, an advertisement for your Web site will appear. The advertisement may be a banner ad or another type of online advertisement that you create. For example, suppose your own a business that sells pools and spas. You could purchase the word “pools” on Yahoo! so that whenever someone searches for that word, a banner ad for your company will appear on the search results screen.
Keyword-based advertising doesn’t necessarily involve banner ads. For example, Google (www.google.com), one of the Internet’s most popular search engines, allows you to create text ads for your company that will be displayed whenever an Internet user searches for a keyword that
you’ve selected. Google’s program, called AdWords (adwords.google.com), is affordable for small businesses because there is no monthly minimum spending limit and it costs just $5 to set up your account.
Keyword Research
Part of the challenge in using keyword-based marketing on the Internet is to pick the keywords that your customers are most likely to be using when they are doing searches on search engines and Web directories. This will likely require a bit of brainstorming on the part of yourself and your staff.
That’s your job. To help you brainstorm, you might want to check out a few of the search engines that reveal what Internet users are searching for.
For example, Lycos has a service called “The Lycos 50 Daily Report” (50.lycos.com) that shows you what people are searching for on the Lycos search engine. Every week, Lycos publishes the 50 most popular searches from the past week.
You may also want to check out the MetaSpy (www.metaspy.com), a service operated by the MetaCrawler, search engine. MetaSpy will show you what Internet users are searching for right now.
You’ll certainly find these services to be entertaining, if not inspirational as well!