In times past there was no trouble getting an upper position in those highly searched, general keywords like ‘china’, ‘business’, ‘running’ and ‘headache’ for a nickel a click. When you did a search on Google for one of those terms, you would get only 1 or 2 results, indicating to you that you could bid a minimum price for your clicks.

But advertisers had a very hard time getting a generic term like “running” to stick, especially in the early days before phrase- and exact-match options were available. A person who typed in a keyword like “business” could have any of a thousand completely different ideas in mind for what he was looking for, so he was not only unlikely to click on your ad, but even if he did click on it, he was that much less likely to buy anything from you.

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