Pay For Placement: Keyword Bidding By bidding for certain keywords, you can improve your search results.
By Aliza P. Sherman •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
In yesterday's tip, Alison Berke, president of bworks.com,introduced us to the concept of keyword buying. Now let's hearfrom her about keyword bidding.
"Another way to buy positioning on search engines isthrough "keyword bidding" at GoTo.com. GoTo lets users bid on thekeywords they'd like to be listed under, and the highest bidderis listed first. Then when someone types your search term into thesearch box, you'll be listed first on the results page. You candictate the exact description you'd like listed for your Website.
"In terms of cost, you only pay your bid price if someoneactually 'clicks' on your Web site and visits it. The realpayoff for GoTo.com is that their results are being incorporatedinto so many other search engines. As with the Real Names strategy,Goto.com results are featured on many different search engines,like Netscape, AOL, HotBot, Lycos and Alta Vista. Each searchengine has a different way of featuring GoTo listings, and severalof them use the GoTo results as their first three results on asearch. Therefore, it's smart to pay to be in the top 3listings.
"GoTo.com keywords can cost anywhere from .01 - $5.00 ormore per click. GoTo also gives detailed reports on how your bidsare doing and how many clicks you're getting per keyword on adaily basis."
Berke does have a caveat when doing keyword bidding: "Makesure you aren't bidding more on a search term than it'sactually worth. If you get into a bidding war with another Website, it may not be a good investment to pay $5 per click ifyou're not going to get at least $5 from each potentialcustomer. For example, you may get 50 clickthroughs from a $5listing-which translates to $250 but only one or two people maygive you business-are you going to make at least $250 from thetransactions?"
Aliza Sherman is an entrepreneur and author of Cybergrrl:A Woman's Guide to the World Wide Web (Ballantine Books).She is currently working on her next book and new company.
