FREE TOOLS FOR EVALUATING PAY-PER-CLICK ENGINES...

If you are attempting to evaluate the potential traffic from any PPC [Pay-Per-Click search engine] (or assess the importance of any website), there are two important desktop tools that might be helpful to you.

The first is the Google Tool Bar. Using the Google Page Rank system you will get a relative feel for the importance of a given website. Note that this measurement is not precise. In fact, it is really nothing more than a brilliant marketing ploy by Google, but it does give you some feel for whether or not a given PPC is worth your time submitting to. Google uses a complicated algorithm to determine page rank (PR) but the main consideration is the number of incoming links to the site in question. I strongly recommend that you download the Google Tool Bar to your desktop and refer to it.

The second, and perhaps more important, tool is the Alexa Tool Bar. This tool will give a numerical ranking of any web site based on the actual traffic to that site. Any PPC which falls below the 200,000 range is probably not worth your time submitting to. They just do not have enough real traffic to do you any good.

Using the combination of these two free tools will allow you to better judge which PPC's you should spend your valuable time submitting search terms and phrases to. Recognize that these are just rough tools ... your judgement should always be the deciding factor. Some PPC's, because of the highly specialized nature of the target audience, will not do well in either the Google Page Rank or the Alexa traffic counts. They still might return good results and be worth your efforts.