Every small business with a website wants to be visible on the leading search engines, and they don't come more leading than Google.
It was used by 9,753,000 Britons in February, according to Nielsen NetRatings - making it by some distance the most popular search engine in the UK.
Google relies heavily on links from other sites to establish a site's rank, rather than on key words in the web page's text or in the "alt tags" - keywords in the code of web pages that are not displayed to the casual browser, but are used by many search engines to consider relevance. As a result, it can be difficult to generate a high position through site design - one of the reasons users like it.
But since last September, Google has taken targeted advertising from thousands of small UK businesses, in the form of the shaded sponsored links to the right-hand side of the rankings, known as AdWords.
Signing up with AdWords takes about 20 minutes. It costs £5 to activate the account and you are charged for every time someone clicks on your advert - a minimum of 4p - rather than how many times it appears. The charge is made regardless of whether the person buys anything from you and the amount varies depending on how high you want to be on the AdWords' rankings for a particular search term. The rank is also affected by how many people click on your advert. You state a cap for both your cost per click-through and your daily spending.
It can be absurdly expensive to be at the top of the AdWords list for a popular search term: Google recently quoted £11.60 per click-through to be top of the searches made on the word "hosting" in English within the UK. If you wanted to go global, the system estimates you would get 950 people clicking through at £15.69 a time - costing £14,900.91 a day.
"It's an auction model, so the price is determined by the market," says Kate Burns, head of UK sales for Google. "Not very popular - or very targeted - keywords can be quite cheap."
For 4p, you could still get in at an average UK position of 7.7 on "hosting". And for more obscure search terms, you may have the top (and indeed only) advert at the minimum price, so the service looks particularly attractive for niche businesses.
Search terms have to match exactly; adding an "s" or a hyphen will stop a match. So it may be worth including common variants such as plurals, which you can provide for no extra cost. If there are two or more words in your search term, your ad will appear if all these words are in a user's search, regardless of their order.
A UK-only search appears to British users of both google.com and google.co.uk, by checking users' internet protocol addresses. However, users anywhere in the world can see the advert if they go through google.co.uk.
The AdWords reporting system gives you a great deal of information: how many times your advert appeared, how many times it was clicked on, the resulting click-through percentage rate and how much you paid per click on average.
Are there minus points? Google's reputation has taken a knock recently, as it started placing press releases on its so-called news site without distinguishing them from genuine reportage, although this does not affect the main search facilities. The company said recently that it will differentiate these press releases in the near future.
Although Google leads among the general search engines, it may make more sense to use one specific to your industry. Accommodation, where people search with fixed parameters such as location and quality, lends itself well to this. Furthermore, such sites can provide relevant additional services, such as allowing users to book rooms online.
Other sites may offer to link to yours for free, perhaps in return for a reciprocal link to theirs. Interlinking in this way can also help your standard, free rating on Google.
Web-design experts say that you should worry about the quality of your site before paying to bring in users. Fred Bamber, a UK Online for Business adviser in the north-east, says that one way is to build two or more gateways to your site - or even several distinct sites - if you are targeting different markets. These would stand a better chance on search engines, compared with an all-purpose site.
"The policy should be to look at your website, so it is optimised," says Bamber. "I have a client who doesn't do much on paying, but finds the site is ranked top on AltaVista, and in the first eight on Google." However, he says AdWords may be worth using in moderation.
Liz Hurles, a creative director at web-designer SBI & Co, says it is vital that the words used - for an AdWords campaign and for the words used in the site's text and its alt tags - are chosen with great care from a marketing point of view. "You shouldn't rush and spend a lot of money," she says. She also says that, with Google's focus on links in ranking a site's importance, you might focus on this to boost your rank in the normal search. "Some people have had great success in putting something newsworthy on their site, getting a few thousand hits, and going on to the top 10 on that search," she says. Getting higher on that particular search is likely to generate more hits, which should help maintain a high position.
If you do pay for advertising, through AdWords or otherwise, you should ask clients how they found you so you can work out how much it costs to "acquire" a customer through each method of advertising.
If you ran a guesthouse, spent £25 through Google for five customers and £50 with the tourist board's website for 25, then it would be costing £5 to acquire a customer through Google and £2 through the tourist board. That would not mean you should stop using the former, but it would help you decide which to use if you could only afford one.
Help Panel: What you can do for free
· Submit your site to the main free search engines and directories. Google accepts submissions at www.google.co.uk/addurl.html, Yahoo at uk.docs.yahoo.com/info/include.html and AltaVista at addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new. The last two make a charge for express consideration, but this is unlikely to be worth paying for small businesses. You could also try www.ineedhits.com/add-it/free/, a free submission service for 28 search engines.
· Try to generate more links to your site. Ask friends and associates to put a link on their site to yours, and offer to do the same for them. This will help others find your site and can improve your position on link-based search engines such as Google.
