When working with the pay engines, it takes practice to achieve a level of success. So, start out slowly, and keep a tight rein on the budget. As you become better at choosing highly targeted keywords and crafting titles and descriptions, you?ll gradually be able to increase your budget.

Here are some tips to boost your chances of success with search engies:

1. It’s not always best to be #1. Many compulsive "clickers" automatically click on the #1 result when they have no real interest in buying your products or services.

2. Be sure to include your keyword phrase in the title and description you create at the pay engines. Take special care in creating a description for your site, since within the top three slots, the best description gets the most traffic, as a general rule.

3. The keywords must be relevant to the content of your pages.

4. Choose very targeted keywords so that you don’t pay for needless click throughs. Don?t ever choose a general keyword, because your costs will skyrocket but the traffic won?t convert to sales.

5. Spend time researching your keyword choices at Overture’s Search Term Suggestion Tool http://inventory.overture.com/ or WordTracker:
http://www.wordtracker.com/moreinfo.html

6. Generally, you’ll have more success if you purchase 10- 20 keywords as opposed to just a few.

7. Choose a broad range of keywords and bid prices and test the waters. Watch your keywords carefully. Non-productive keywords should be eliminated and new, more productive keywords should be purchased instead.

8. For Overture, consider purchasing a "Premium Listing," which means that you hold the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd ranking for your keyword phrase. Why? Because engines like AltaVista and Lycos show the first listings only.

9. Set up a separate "tracking" page to send your pay engine traffic. In order to show whether or not the cost is worth it, you need to be able to track your click throughs and sales. Don’t send pay engine traffic to your home page.

10. Write your title and description using ?objective? language rather than ?subjective.? In other words, don?t say that your product or service is the best or #1 (subjective). Rather, list some of the benefits of your service that make it unique (objective).