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It's crowded at the top. The top of online search pages that is.

Building a credible Web presence that brings a company to that much coveted virtual real estate can take months and serious dollars. Thankfully, even cash strapped small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) can compete with the big guys through some judicious purchases of select keywords which can lure search engines to present their ads as primary choices in a surfer's search results.

“Everyone want to be on the top three or five spaces of page one, because numerous survey indicate that surfers easily lose interest and rarely go beyond the second page,” says Tim Richardson, professor of e-commerce, marketing and international business at the Seneca College and University of Toronto.

Organizations can either work their way up, building traffic by constantly working on their site creating search-worthy content, and employing various tactics such as establishing Web-links by joining relevant communities, blogging or responding to popular blogs.

Whether done by an in-house staff or a hired third party marketing firm, such a method could take several months to develop the desired results and considerable capital outlay.

Another option, Richardson said, is to buy your way to the top by signing up with online major search engines such a Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Microsoft Live Search and bidding for keywords they offer in the market. The advertisers pay the search engines for every click on their ad gets. The pay-per-click (PPC) technique has gained industry prominence since 2004.

The objective is the snap-up keywords -- often priced at around five cents to upwards of $2.00 per click – that are relevant to your product or campaign and are popular enough to land your site on the primary search list.

For FrontierPC.com Computer Inc., an online computer dealer based in Vancouver, the scheme has been very profitable.

The 15-year-old company, which serves the Canada-wide B2B market, was initially signed up with Google AdWords and Overture. But recently decided to enlist Microsoft Live Search as well for want of “better results.”

“Google and Overture definitely provided a larger audience but we were not getting adequate conversion rates from the clicks their engines provided,” said Barry Johnson, general manager for FrontierPC.com.

Conversion rates refer to the number of click on a certain ad that eventually lead to a sale.

Overture and AdWords conversion rates are below one per cent while those provided by the Live Searches adCenter online advertising tool reached 2.2 to four per cent, said Johnson. “Basically, we get the same number of qualified clients from Live Search for about half of what we pay for with Google.”

The company, however, still retains Google and Overture because it wants to “cover all the bases.”

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