Advertising is the core component in the promotion of an online marketing business. The purpose of advertising is, of course, to drive traffic to sales pages and hopefully close sales or capture leads. Once you decide to promote a product or service, you must know where to find potential buyers and then drive them to the place you want them to go. This is one of the fundamental rules to build a successful online business. No traffic means no sales or recruits. Traffic from search engines is without doubt of the best quality and the most targeted, which is why many webmasters or affiliates shell out big bucks just to get top listings in major search engines by designing 'search engine friendly' web pages.

However, achieving the top position for a popular term in major search engines is a tough job. It'll take weeks or months before a well optimized web page get listed on the first page for a specific term. Fortunately, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing service fills the gap and well suits the needs of marketers who want to attract laser-targeted traffic to achieve immediate results within the shortest period of time. In the world of PPC marketing service, there are currently three major players, as well as other smaller PPC search engines like Miva, Big Daddy, and Kanoodle. These three big players are Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter, with each having its own PPC campaign management structure, keyword suggestion and conversion tracking tools.

In PPC marketing, marketers are charged a fee for each click through they received. Rankings are typically based on an auction system, where the higher one bids, the higher one's ranking. But there's an exception to this. Google Adwords differs from other PPC advertising networks in the fact that their placement of marketers' links isn't just based on the bid price. It incorporates several factors such as relevance of the ad copy, historical keyword performance, and quality of the landing page into their Quality Score to better serve their users.

Generally, the PPC search listings appear above and to the right of the natural search results located in the middle of the search page, and they are referred to as 'sponsored links' on Google and 'sponsored results' on Yahoo. The sponsored listings are very desirable placements because they are usually the first links that browsers see when search engines return their search results.

PPC campaigns can bring impressive sales because marketers are allowed to pay for performance by means of attracting precisely targeted traffic to their niches. By bidding on keywords related to the product or service they are promoting, marketers can locate people actively searching for precisely what they are offering. This marketing strategy works amazingly when the right keywords are chosen. The more targeted the keywords, the better results you'll receive.

With this being said, PPC marketing has raised a lot of concern about manipulation and the results being irrelevant. In an ideal situation, the auction system, combined with the editorial team from search engines, should have produced highly relevant search results. However, this is not the case in the real world. Many marketers managed to figure out a way to cheat the system even though search engines constantly improve their algorithms for delivering better search results.

Google changed their Adwords ad ranking and ad relevancy algorithms several weeks ago. Many advertisers worldwide have been affected, and the most common effect is with regard to minimum cost-per-click on keywords, where minimum bid prices skyrocket to prices that seem ridiculously high. Why the change? you may ask. Well, Google prides themselves on relevancy and delivering the highest quality search results to their users. By doing this, they keep people using Google instead of other services like Yahoo! or MSN. The smart guys at Google realize that Google's future relies on loyal users rather than paying advertisers. Keeping users get sticky to their search engine service is their first priority. Without the large base of end-users, no marketers would use Google's advertising service. Yahoo is said to be following Google's strategies to tweak their system. The steps taken by these two giant players represent the trend of PPC marketing.

So, let's get things straight here: strict regulations and a high importance on relevancy mean that marketers with the right knowledge will be able to use them to their advantage and dominate the niches they operate in. I have seen many unprepared marketers drop off the face of the earth when Google's changes went into effect in the past. Those who survived have seen higher traffic and conversions as a result. What should you do to win the PPC marketing war with ever-changing search engine algorithms? Just follow the web page building philosophies of search engines to provide a unique browsing experience for your visitors. You'd better equip yourself with techniques to handle any changes made by Google or Yahoo if you want to reap the most profits from your PPC campaigns.