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Search Engine Marketing | Internet Marketing Ireland
SEM | Banner Ad Campaigns
One of the more popular, although potentially expensive, methods of bringing
good links to your site is through the use of banner ads.
To ensure a good ROI for this particular method you will need to spend
some time engaged in research. The process is simple, however, just create
a banner for your web site and then pay another site to play host to the
ad, positioning it somewhere prominent in the pages of its site. When
a visitor to their site clicks on your banner they are directed to your
web site, landing on a page chosen in advance by you. This 'click through'
as it is known is usually handled by a central ad server. Most of these
banner ads operate on a click-through payback system.
When the site hosting your ad scans its logfiles, it detects any web users
who have visited your site in their log files, and the advertiser then
pays some small amount of money based on the number of clicks or visitors
received. How they behave once they land on your site is immaterial, hence
the need of good research into the keywords used and the host sites chosen.
In essence, all online banners ads behave exactly the
same as other traditional advertisements. Consumers are notified about
the service or product your business is offering, and are presented with
reasons why they should choose your particular service or product over
the competitions. However, banner ads on the web have
two significant advantages, it is possible to monitor the results of your
campaign in real time and it is possible to highly target the user's interests.
SEM | Contextual Advertising Online
At first it might appear that contextual advertising
is very similar to the PPC programs that deliver sponsored results on
the pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN, but there is one essential difference and
that is in how these results are distributed online to internet users.
Pay Per Click (or Cost Per Click) advertising always appears on the search
engine results pages, usually at the top but also in the right hand column,
of the major engines and portals. Contextual ads appear
within the actual pages of content based web sites across the web. Contextual
advertising can best be thought of as a hybrid of keyword based PPC advertising
and banner ads.
The key advantages of contextual advertising
over other online advertising programs are threefold. Banner ad hosts
have to be chosen on a site by site basis, which involves a time-consuming
process of identifying and selecting a suitable web site, and negotiating
a placement fee with them. This is not true of contextual ads. Banner
ads are invariably heavy with graphics, and can be quite intrusive to
the average web user, whereas contextual ads are text-based ads and considerably
more subtle. And last but not least, contextual ads have
already proven to be a lot more popular with online customers, and usually
generate much higher click-through rates.
SEM | How Contextual Advertising Works
There isn't a lot of difference in how a contextual advertising
campaign is developed and how a keyword based search advertising campaign
is designed. In both cases, the advertiser selects keywords they know
to be relevant to their products or services, then draft some text-based
content for those keywords. The ads are placed with the search supplier
who serves them automatically to a variety of participating content web
sites according to how they match up for relevancy. This relevancy is
determined by the engine's own algorithm, pairing your keywords with web
sites that contain content related to, and including, those keywords.
A high percentage of the web sites that are chosen to host your text-based
ad will already have high rankings, thus helping you to expand your online
audience by placing it where users would not have found it previously,
especially if they had missed it in the SERPs.
SEM | Buying Links with High PageRank
Before the introduction of PPC programs and contextual ads,
one of the most popular ways for site owners to try improve their site's
rankings and position was to get some links from a 'super site' to their
home page. Recently, however the debate has intensified over how useful
PageRank actually is. Certainly, site owners like Google's little tool
because it gives them a visible means of measuring how "good" their site
is, or at least how good it appears to be to Google. At Avatar Web
Solutions we have found that it is still possible to achieve good
rankings for a search term in the SERPs without having a huge PR, in fact
many sites in Google's top ten will have a PageRank of 4 or lower. The
fact is, the longer your site continues to exist and offer valuable content,
the more good sites will request links from you, and the higher your PageRank
will climb.
Still, a one-way link from a high traffic site that gets millions
of visits per month may give your page a Page Rank boost. It will
certainly increase traffic, though not necessarily targeted traffic, as
visitors to the established site click through to yours. And of course,
it will be counted as a high relevancy link by the spiders who index the
site where you've bought a link.
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