Most new websites jumpstart their traffic with a pay per click advertising campaign, especially new sites that fall victim to the Google sandbox. Before I go over the role of Pay Per Click and SEO or Search Engine Optimization, we should cover the Google sandbox which is one of the big reasons why Pay Per Click is going to always be a very important of Search Engine Optimization.

What is the Sandbox? The sandbox it quite simply a theoretical box that holds sites for months keeping them out of the real world results for a certain period of time, which allows Google to assign a trust rating to the website to help keep spammy sites from shooting to the top of the search engines using shady tactics to make a quick buck. Most of the time, a new site will stay in the sandbox for 6 months to over a year. Because there are such a wide variety of opinions of the Google sandbox I will stick to my experiences as the SEO for a local small business. I have found that while it is possible to rank for easy non competitive terms, it is impossible to rank for more competitive searches while you are a victim to the dreaded Sandbox. My best advice is to keep working your site so that when you do come out, you will hit the ground running.

Now that we have briefly covered the Sandbox, how does pay per click fit into the big picture of SEO? There are several ways. The first is the ability to fill in the cracks for terms that you do not rank for. The second being if you are in the sandbox, sheltered from the outside world, you can buy your way into what ever you would like. This allows you to see what terms provide high quality traffic, which will help you to see what direction you need to take your site optimization. Pay per click allows you to be on the first page for any term no matter if your site is 2 weeks old, or 2 years old. A lot of sites continue to take part in pay per click for the life of thier site because the return on investment is seen to be good enough to keep the account active. Be sure to do your own testing when choosing pay per click sites so that you find your happy medium.

In order to have an effective pay per click advertising campaign, there are several you will need to take. Google Adwords is my personal favorite so I wrote this article assuming that is what we are using.

Your first step will be to write an effective title and description for each of your sites major topics. This link must convince the prospective searcher to click on your ad to view your site over your competitors. You need to place careful thought into catching your users attention while helping them to see the relevancy of your site to their search.

For the second step, you will need to buy keywords for each of your ad groups. This basically picks which search terms you want your listings, or ad groups, to be displayed on. As you can see, it can be a very time consuming to maintain a pay per click as you may end up with 10 targeted adgroups with a hundred or so keywords each. Sites like Yahoos Overture as even more time consuming because you must bid on the terms in a way that encourages bidding wars. This causes you to micromanage your account to get the most you can out of the program.

I hope you can now see a bigger picture so that you know what to expect. The Internet is still a very new medium, and is getting more competitive everyday, but as with any other business there is still a lot of money to be made for the ones with the time and dedication to work hard.