Pay per click advertising and Search Engines

[Stevo]

Hi All,

I'm quite (very) new to this whole forum, so it just like to say its nice to be here. I also pray you'll bear with me if this has been posted on before-still working it all out.

I have question regarding pay per click advertising - if you employ such advertising (apart from benefits if people actually click through) will it improve your search engine rank - as far as link popularity goes (ie. do these 'ads' count as links to your site?). I wonder as one of our competitors has som 14,000 links to our few hundred, and they seem to be using a lot of 'pay per click'.

Any help or ideas would be heaps appreciated!

Steve