What Is Paid Placement?

Paid placement is a form of paid inclusion. Paid inclusion is one model of search engine marketing. In paid inclusion, paying a fee to a search engine guarantees display of a specific website in the search results of designated search terms. In the paid inclusion model, the paying site may either be identified as an advertiser or included without comment among other sites that have achieved their ranking through search engine optimization of the site. Additionally, the search engine may crawl the paying site more frequently than sites that do not pay, which offers additional advantages, especially if the site is frequently populated with fresh content.

Paid placement is more specific that paid inclusion. With paid placement, a site may be guaranteed a link that appears at the top of the search results or on the right side of regular search results, depending on the search engine. The quality of the ad may contribute to the placement location. Paid placement positions may be auctioned, with the best position going to the highest bidder. They may also be charged per visitor to the website (Cost Per Click).

What Are the Benefits of Paid Placement?

Although many people value the "organic" or "pure" approach of using fresh, targeted content and keywords to achieve search engine ranking, there are situations in which paid placement can be highly beneficial:

• Startups If you need to give your website a boost as you get started, the benefits of paid placement may come to the fore. Building up site content takes time, but paid placement can get the flow of visitors to your website started.

• Strong Keyword Competition If the keywords for your particular market niche are highly competitive and you are up against other, more well-established etailers, you can get yourself into the running using paid placement.

• Technical Site Design If your site requires (or simply has, for the time being) a structure that thwarts search engines (like content that is database driven), and is not a quick fix, paid placement is beneficial in bringing your content to the attention of searchers.

• SEO Isn't Succeeding If your best efforts at SEO aren't getting you the rankings you need, paid placement can supplement the flow of visitors.

•  Quick and Predictable If you need a quick and predictable result to a business change—such as a merger, a new name, a new product, a seasonal product shift—you can more likely to get the results you desire with paid placement than SEO.

• Test New Keywords A stint with paid placement can allow you to gather data and analyze the sales results of a venture into new territory.

• Not Necessarily Long-term Once a website has reached its position through SEO (organic means), paid placement can be reduced or eliminated.