Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, which is also known as pay per performance or paid search, remains one of the quickest and direct ways of promoting your business, and driving targeted traffic to your website.

While it would be nice to achieve high natural (free) search engine rankings; organic rankings do take some time to take effect. And, with tens of thousands of website owners all competing for the same keyword search term, it's a challenging prospect (and quite a rare one) to achieve top spot rankings for a popular search term, based solely on organic SEO.

How Does Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work?

PPC is simple really. Search engines like Google make their money by selling advertising space to website owners, and is generally the space you see running down the right hand side of the search results page, and across the top of the page; highlighted in blue. To get your website listed here, you have to pay, or bid against competitors for keywords; however you only actually pay the search engine each time a visitor clicks through to your website from the search engine. This is basically what Pay Per Click advertising is.

It is worth noting that you will only ever pay up to the maximum bid you place for each search term; generally speaking the higher you bid for a keyword, the more likely you are to appear highly in the search results. In addition, within Google, the position of your Ad will depend on its