Guaranteed Google Listings in 24 Hours!

Sound familiar? If not, count yourself lucky. But for the rest of us, these inbox-cluttering messages arrive on a regular basis. They promise guaranteed listings in Google, complete with top rankings for keywords and swarms of traffic. But unfortunately, this offer is almost always too good to be true.

Most of these services, for example, claim to secure organic traffic (which is free traffic from search engines) and high pagerank. However, the only way to achieve guaranteed listings and top rankings is if you purchase pay-per-click advertising spots, which do not increase your pagerank or affect your organic traffic.

How does pay-per-click advertising work?

In pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you select a set of keywords relevant to your website. Next, when a user searches for any of the keywords, your sponsored listing (which contains a title and a few words advertising your products or services) may appear in the sidebar. And finally, if a user clicks on your ad, they are redirected to your website and you are charged for the click. (The image below, courtesy of Google AdWords, shows the placement of your PPC sponsored ads.)

One of the benefits of PPC advertising is that you are only charged when users click on your ads. However, there is one major problem with PPC advertising. It can be very very expensive. Some popular keywords, for example, cost several dollars per click! So if your website cannot convert those clicks into successful sales, then you might find yourself losing a lot of money.

Another problem with PPC advertising is that it is not sustainable. This means that you can have traffic ONLY as long as you can afford to pay for it. As a result, a better method for securing traffic would be to build organic search engine traffic.

Get traffic from Google the right way!

The best way to get traffic from Google is to optimize your website and ensure that it gets indexed. Some easy methods to do this include: submitting your website to Google, creating and submitting sitemaps, regularly adding new content, and building inbound links.

For additional methods on building quality traffic for your website, see our articles 3 Reasons You Should Never Pay For Advertising and How to Improve and Maintain Your Google Pagerank. And whether or not you opt for PPC advertising, be sure not to opt in to any third-party schemes which guarantee unobtainable results.