Search engine advertising, is it always a good idea?  There are some great ways to promote your website, online ads may be one of them.     By John Bolduan RealWebMarketing.com

A long time ago, the only way to get to the top of the search engine results page was to endlessly tweak your web pages until they became more relevant. This was very early on in the internet marketing game and didn't always work too well. As the internet progressed, so did search engines offering paid advertising to get a high listing as an ad. This search engine advertising has become a staple of many businesses and some relying on it so heavily that if bid prices get too high, it could affect their business.

There is a place for search engine advertising. When your website is new, certain kinds of paid ads might help you get the exposure you need to get moving. If you've been on the internet for a while and you're looking to improve in a certain area, then that would be another logical choice for this kind of ad. Most people think that the most popular terms are the only ones that bring in traffic. When the internet was newer, that may have been the case, but that's changed. Many people are more sophisticated when they do a search and are more specific.

Some of the choices for search engine advertising include all the major players. Google has AdWords, Yahoo has Overture and MSN will probably be coming out with it's own paid search results when they introduce their new search algorithm later this year. There are also many small search engines that have their own paid search model too. Google probably gets some of the best traffic that turns searchers into customers. It's not cheap and the price seems to rise slowly but surely. Overture gets some good results too, but I think the ROI on their paid search isn't what it used to be. Companies spend many thousands of dollars per year to work these strategies. Because of that, you must have a very clear picture of results, that is how many people convert from searchers to a beloved customer.

Som s in search engine advertising are becoming just plain nuts. I know that some of these companies aren't getting their money back on them, although some do it just to get more exposure. I don't understand that but there are some that do. Th s go into multiple dollars per click. That may be okay if you're GM but probably not if you're a mom and pop operation. There are times where you must take a step back and look at the ad budget and evaluate whether the paid ads pay for themselves. I've had to do this in the past and changed a few things saving thousands of dollars while not hurting website traffic in the least. So it sounds good to do a paid listing that shows up on page one, but it doesn't always pay off. I would say that most paid ads barely pay off.

When it comes to search engine advertising, you have to be smarter, not have more money. Don't do things with it that you wouldn't do with other forms of ads like getting to cavalier with too much at once blowing your budget. Sometimes paid ads make sense and other times they don't. Experiment a little to see what works and see if you're getting some results before your throw a lot of money at it.