Let’s start with Pay Per Click Search Engines. These are called PPC for short and you’ll hear people say “PPC” a lot as you get into internet marketing. You’ve probably already heard of PPC search engines, but just for the beginners reading this, let’s go over exactly what they are and what they do.

A few years ago, there was no such thing as a pay-per-click Search Engine. Getting your website listed on search engines was quite different a few years ago. Yah, up until around 1998, if you wanted to get your website listed on major search engines you just went to your favorite search engines, entered your website address and pressed the submit button. Then you waited, and waited, and waited for up to several weeks or months until your listings showed up. The only good thing about those old days was the fact that all your listings were free.

But now even though most search engines charge some sort of fee to be immediately considered for a listing, there are some strong advantages to these new paid search engines. For instance with PPC search engines, you don’t have to wait weeks or months before your listing appears. In most cases you can have your website listed on a PPC search engine within about 5 minutes.

The other problem that existed back before pay-per-click engines existed (before 1997) was the fact that even after waiting all that time for your listing to appear, you never knew where it was going to be ranked. I’ve waited up to 3 months to be listed on a free search engine only to find out that it was listed on the third page of results at #27.

How many people are actually going to click their way to the 3rd page of search results on a search engine? Not many! Usually nobody does. So even though that particular listing may have been free, it turned out to be just a waste of my time since it came up at 27th from the top.

With PPC that’s all changed. Now with PPC search engines, you simply sign up as a member and deposit a small amount of money into your membership account. Then you just enter your website address and using a web-based control panel they provide you with, you can have your website listed at #1 in a few minutes. And you can be #1 for as many keywords, or subject terms as you want as long as they’re relevant to your business and website. This means you can have a major presence on the internet as soon as your website is built. No more waiting!

The only down-side is that it’s not cheap if you’re using a major pay-per-click engine such as Overture (formerly Goto.com) In my opinion, Overture.com is has the greatest reach because Overture has made deals with many other popular search engines so that when you get listed on Overture your website will end up on these other engines. And some of them are giants like Yahoo.com

Most internet marketers agree that Overture is the biggest PPC engine. I don’t think there’s really anyone who doubts that. But as I said earlier, you pay a hefty price to be listed on Overture because the whole rest of the internet is bidding against you. And often times this means people keep out-bidding you in order to be listed above you. So keeping your website up on top and at a good price is a constant battle, but I still think it’s worth it and I do recommend Overture.

But for those of you who don’t have a lot of money to spend on advertising, there are many smaller pay-per-click search engines where you can get much better prices. Some of them include, Sprinks.com, Xuppa.com, FindWhat.com, Kanoodle.com, and 7search.com

Those are the 2nd biggest search engines going down from Overture. But there’s hundreds of even smaller ones you’ll see all over. I don’t recommend anything smaller than the pay-per-click engines I just listed above. They usually are so small that they waste your time. Kind of like pennies waste your time when you try to sort them out and buy something big with them.