It is an advert for your web site which appears at or near the top of major search engine search results listings, for which you pay a small fee only when a potential customer visits your web site via your advertisement.   You do not pay a huge sum in advance for an advertisement which may or may not result in any visits to your site.   You only pay for visits which result from your sponsored listing - not for visits to your web site from other sources.  The arrangement we operate is through E-spotting (UK) Ltd, who manage a major UK search engine.  You can see full details by transferring to the Espotting web site, by clicking here or by clicking on the long blue button at the foot of this page;  if you wish, you can then open your own account, and arrange for your own well-positioned web site listing.

You determine this, by entering your own 40-character long heading for your listing, your own 180-character description, your web site address, and if you wish, your business logo.  Below you can see A1 Web Design's own Espotting entry for the search term "website developer", for which at the time of publishing this web page, as you can see, the cost was 7p per visit made to our web site via the Espotting entry.  All sponsored (paid for) entries are boxed on the Espotting site, like the one shown below, which occupied the no. 1 position.

Notice that after conducting a search for a specific search term on the Espotting web site, when you look at one of the resulting sponsored entries,  you can tell what the cost is for each visit to the sponsored web site.  So if you do a search on the Espotting web site for one of your own web site's key search terms, you will see what your rivals are paying for their own entries for the same search term.  You can then choose to pay the appropriate amount per visit, in order to place your own advert in whatever position you choose.  The higher up the rankings you decide to position your advert, the more you will pay.  But the cost is always under your own control.

Your web site will not only be highly placed in the Espotting search engine rankings, but will also appear as a sponsored web site in many other UK search engines, including the following, at the time of writing:-

The contractual arrangements which Espotting has with the major UK  search engines, vary from time to time and from engine to engine;  new engines will sometimes be added, and others will be removed.  The top so many Espotting entries (adverts) are used in the other engines;  the numbers of Espotting entries used vary from time to time, depending on the search engine, from three to thirteen.

The positions where the Espotting entries are used by the other search engines again vary from engine to engine.  If the engine has its own sponsored entries, and if there are any for your search term, these generally appear first.  The Espotting entries either appear all together in a block, or as two blocks, separated by some entries from the particular engine concerned.  The format of the entries again varies, and only the first so many characters of the Espotting entry may be used;  if you have a logo in your Espotting entry, it will not necessarily be included in other listings.

If you click here, you can see exactly what the sponsored entries for A1 Web Design looked like when the master Espotting advert was set up, in Yahoo, and in the other major U.K. engines listed in the table above.  Click here to see.

You pay as much or as little as you choose, subject to a minimum of 10p per site visit.  You pay as much as you need, in order to get to whatever position you select in the ranked listings.  In most cases, the costs are under £1 per site visit, and many are as low as 10p or 11p.  If you choose to get to the top of the ranked listings, you only have to pay 1p more than whatever the owner of the website which is currently at the number 1 position is paying.  Or you can elect to pay just enough to position your site 2nd, 3rd or 4th, or at a lower position in the Espotting listings.

Yes, by topping up your Espotting account to a spending limit which is acceptable to you.  When that account is nearing zero, you will be sent an e-mail message advising you of the situation, and you can choose then, either to allow more visits to your site from the sponsored listings by topping up your account, or to ignore the e-mail message, so stopping further visits until such time as you are happy to top up your account again.

Normally within a few working days.  And your site will also normally appear in the other linked search engines as well within that time, i.e. in Yahoo, AskJeeves, Hotbot, Looksmart, Lycos, UKPlus, NTLWorld, SearchUK and so on.

The Espotting web site allows you to monitor your search terms and where your site currently is in the rankings, and so manage them, by adjusting the price you pay per visit from time to time as necessary, in order to maintain your desired ranking.  For example, for A1 Web Design, at one point in time there were two search terms recorded: "web developer" and "website developer".  The Espotting account for A1 Web Design then looked like this:-

(A "bid" is the cost you choose to pay for each visit made to your web site from your sponsored listing).

As can be seen, for both search terms, A1 Web Design held the no. 1 ranking position on Espotting.