For a start, you can achieve a top ranking within hours of launching a campaign on many search engines – which is in stark contrast to the weeks or months you‘ll wait to see natural rankings appear.

You’ll also have a chance to receive a guaranteed placement on every keyword you choose without needing to tweak the content of your web site pages. You'll then keep your ranking until someone outbids you. When this happens, your listing will be pushed down a notch.

In essence, you bid on rankings in a real-time auction environment similar to the way eBay auctions products. You pay only as much as you choose for the visitors they send you.

The advantage of pay per click over other disciplines such as banner ads, for example, is that you do not pay for impressions displayed, but instead for actual click-throughs. With banners, you could purchase 1,000 impressions for £40 and receive only 20 clicks, costing you a whopping £2 per click.

In general, there's no guarantees how much you'll pay per visitor acquired with most forms of advertising. TV, radio, magazines, and others normally force you to bear all the risk. YOU must create ads and pick advertising locations that will be cost-effective for your business.

Of course, with pay per click, you still gamble that the visitors acquired will convert to enough sales to pay for all those clicks!

Even though a pay per click campaign cannot guarantee you'll make a profit, it does also offer you significantly less risk than many other forms of advertising. Each click in theory comes from someone who is actively looking for your products or services.

Bear in mind that not all pay per click campaigns are created equal. Most receive relatively little traffic to their site. Therefore, you could gain dozens of top rankings yet receive little to no clicks during the month. That's the big problem with the majority of the seventy or more "me-too" search engines out there. They aren't worth your time or attention.

So, to make sure your pay per click efforts are optimised:

Focus your bids on keywords that closely apply to your web site's content. You'll be tempted to purchase listings on the most popular keywords, which are often the most expensive and least targeted. However, you pay per click, so you want to do everything you can to ensure that those who click on your ad are truly interested in what you offer.

Secondly, make the listing description closely match your site's content. Create persuasive and compelling descriptions. However, avoid descriptions that are so broad that they bring in too many unqualified prospects. Otherwise you may secure a reasonable per click price but discover that few of those visitors are converting to sales.

Finally, though you may be tempted to bid only on keywords costing a few pence….beware. You can find bargains for sure, but quite often the cheapest keywords are also less popular, and thereby will bring less traffic. It doesn't cost you any money to bid on terms that few people may be clicking on, but it does cost you some time.