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Web marketing has taken on many different shapes during the last 5 years. It has gone from banner advertising to e-mail campaigns, and now we are in the age of pay-per-click systems like Overture and Google Adwords. While everybody may not agree about the effectiveness of using pay-per-clicks advertising, the one thing nobody can take away from them is their ability to drive traffic to a website.

We all know that the traffic that pay-per-clicks drive is only effective when the traffic is made up of targeted customers. What would you do if I told you there was another benefit to the traffic that pay-per-clicks produced? That's right, even the non-targeted traffic that doesn't help your bottom line is slowly helping you move up the ranks in the search engines. How? As search engines become more saturated with websites that contain very similar content they are searching for alternative methods to rank websites effectively. Both websites link rankings and traffic rankings have become popular in many search engines including the large sites like Google. The link ranking is the number of sites that link to your website. This ranking depends on the number of links, how relevant the sites are, and how popular the sites are. On the other hand the traffic ranking is the total number of visitors who are visiting your site each month. Search engines figure if a website is generating 100,000 visitors each day while another is generating 5 this must mean something. And while it's usually never the first thing search engines use to determine rankings it can be a deciding factor later on down the road.

So what did we learn today? When you want to start moving your website up the search engine rankings you can use pay-per-click systems to help you. While it's always a good idea to make sure you are getting a good return on your investment (ROI) with any marketing plan, you need to know that your return may come later down the road when your site starts getting listed the natural way in search engines. By generating traffic using pay-per-click ads, you are placing your website just a single step up above your competition. And when it comes to search engine placement a single step might be all that is needed to turn a website into a successful venture.

Craig Neidel has worked for NetSource Communications Inc. (a web development company) for 6 years and has experience in web development and web marketing. www.ntsource.com