Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns are advertising campaigns that run on search engine result pages. These are also known as search engine advertising and in which payment is based on the number of times the ad is ‘clicked’ from the results list. Here you bid the amount of money you are willing to pay per click for each visitor the PPC engine sends to your Web site. The one with greater bidding amount receives the top position in the list. It allows you choose keywords you would like your ad to appear for when a search is performed.

PPC campaigns are positioned at the right hand side of the SERPs. They are two-three lines of keyword rich text advertising campaigns that are linked to the page where advertiser wants visitors to land. PPC is another mode of online advertising where the media is sold only on clicks not on impressions or actions taken.

Famous of all these is Paid Placements. It gives you the ranking on SERP depending upon your bidding amount. You don't pay to list your site; you only pay for clicks or click thru’s. Your site appears based on search results generated from selected keywords that refer to your product or service. For each keyword you determine how much you are willing to spend on a per-click basis.

Many search engines run PPC campaigns. But the major players are Google, Yahoo, MSN and AltaVista. Today, the major pay per click advertising programs is offered by Google and Yahoo. Google's program called AdWords delivers targeted pay per click ads via its own search engine and a host of partner sites. Yahoo owns Overture which has a selection of specialized PPC advertising programs. These PPC advertising programs offer the best quality traffic for most website marketing campaigns.

Small search engines like Find What and Sprinks offers direct paid placements. The link position in search engine is directly proportional to your bidding amount. The logic is simple- the more you bid the better position you will get and effectively will receive maximum click through. Google AdWords is different. They allow user opinion on how relevant and well-targeted ads for each keyword are by counting the CTR (Click through Rate) as a percentage and multiplying that by your CPC (Cost-Per-Click) to determine the rank of the results. The popular portals and search engines usually combine PPC listings with unpaid listings to ensure any given search produces sufficient paid and non-paid results. Typically, non-paid listings are provided by algorithmic search engines such as Inktomi, Google, FAST, AltaVista or Teoma.

PPC is the best, quick and cost effective advertising program. With the least investment you can get targeted traffic to your website. Generally it takes 5-6 months for search engine optimization of any site. But PPC campaigns can be set up in 5 minutes and you can get your ad at the top of SERP. So PPC can be executed during the SEO process.

While setting up any PPC campaign bidding on right keywords is the most important consideration. The ad must be attractive, persuasive and the linked page must be informative enough. The bidding price varies from keyword to keywords. Bid on some keywords might tough sky high and some might be very low. So biding on the particular keyword depends on your perception and experience. Therefore always ask SEO professionals to plan and manage your PPC campaigns.