For The Small Business Owner
Internet Advertising
Internet advertising is a combination of various disciplines. Some are delivered in a similar fashion to traditional off-line advertising while others are unique to the web. The most important online advertising for any business is the company website. Your website can function as both sales force and customer service and is a way for your business to promote transparency to your customers and clients. No other form of advertising online has the ability to deliver as much as your website. Most other forms of internet advertising are typically geared toward directing people to your website. Banner ads offer many similarites to tradition print advertsing as do video and Flash advertisements. Search engine marketing and optimization has generally proved far more effective as a way to attract targeted visitors to your website. Search engine optimization or SEO is defined as optimizing web pages and web sites so the site will have maximum visibilty in search engine results. Search marketing is generally seen as pay per click advertising (PPC) in which an advertiser bids on keywords and keyphrases so a text advertisement appears in search results. SEO has generally garnered better results, though it can take considerable time before these results are seen. Pay per click ads can generate much quicker results for newer businesses though a combination of both SEO and PPC will usually yield the best overall results.
Banner Ads
Banner ads were one of the first methods companies used to advertise online. They typically do not get a lot of clicks as internet users have learned to block them out somewhat. They can still help increase brand recognition. The banners may not be in the forefront of our minds, but we will see them. The click through of banner ads can be improved by advertising on sites related to your own. Advertisers are experimenting more with the use of Flash banners that are both entertaining and engaging. Banner ads though will probably have the lowest ROI and are perhaps better used for company branding.
Search Engines Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing your individual web pages and website so it has the maximum visibilty in search results. Optimizing pages for search engines has become more and more like traditional marketing over the last few years. The basics are: 1. Research keywords and keyphrases which will bring targeted traffic to your site. 2. Build a site with quality content that also makes it easy for search engine spiders to find and index all of your pages. 3. Network your site, by getting other sites to link to your web pages. While the basic principles are simple to understand search engine optimization can take a lot of time and hard work. There are no magic formulas to good rankings.
A search spider (or robot) is basically a program that visits a web page, gathers information, and records that information. The type of information it looks for depends on what it was programmed to looked for. A spider may be programmed to look for only the links within the code that makes up a web page. Links on a web page are easy to spot since they all essentially use the same HTML code. So a spider can read a file look for the places it recognizes the code for a link and record the urls it finds. At another time it can then visit all the urls it found on that first page and record the links it finds on the new page. By continuing to visit and record urls a search spider can become aware of the existence of many different web pages.
Of course in order for a web page to be found it needs other pages to link to it. Spiders simply follow the trail of links from a given starting point. If no other web page links to yours a spider can't find it. It's one of the reason having other web pages and websites link to your is important.
It's also a reason why it's important to code web pages in a manner in which search spiders can understand. While the code for all links is essentially the same it can be written in different ways. Some ways a spider understands and other ways a spider doesn't understand so well. Search spiders have typically had trouble reading links build with JavaScript and if your links are built using JavaScript it's possible a search spider will misinterpret the code as something other than a link. In that case it won't find the web page on the other end of the link.
Spiders can be programmed to find more than just links. A spider can look for all the the text on your web page. As with links most everything on a web page will be inside of standard HTML tags. Spider can be programmed to recognize the HTML tags and extract the information inside of a paragraph or in a page heading. A spider can even be programmed to look for specific words within a web page. Maybe you're interested in finding information about Abraham Lincoln. You could create a spider that visits web pages and only records those that mention Abraham Lincloln or maybe only record the paragraph that mentions him.
Getting back to search engines they all use algorithms to decide which web page to display in the results to a given search query. A search algorithm may decide that the words used in the title of the page are very important when deciding what that page is about. So when a search spider visits a web page it will probably want to record the title of that page as something separate from everything else.
Ultimately what a search engine knows about your web pages and website it will gather through a spider. When your website is built therefore it's important to understand at least in general how a search spider will see your page. You might have content written in a way that's highly relevant to certain search queries and the search algorithm may agree, but if your content was written in such a way that a spider can't understand it then it may just as well have not been there.
Pay Per Click
Pay per click (PPC) advertising can be a good way to get search traffic to your site without having to wait for your SEO efforts to pay off. With PPC advertising you bid on keywords and keyphrases and are only charged when someone clicks on the link to your web page. As with search engine optimization it's important to research keywords. Since you're paying for each click you want to make sure that the keyphrases you bid on have a greater chance of resulting in a lead or sale. You want to write good copy for your ppc ads to increase the chances of someone clicking on your ad and also make sure the link in the ad takes people to the most relevant page on your site. If your ad mentions a product the link should go directly to a page with that product on it. The page that is on the other side of the link in the ad is called your landing page. Two of the largest PPC programs are Google AdWords and Overture(owned by Yahoo). MSN has also started offering PPC through Microsoft AdCenter. While you bid on each keyphrase the amount you actully pay may be based on several factor, such as the other bids on that keyphase, the quality of your landing page, and the click through rate (CTR) on your ad.
What Makes A Good Website
Your website itself will prove to be the most important internet advertising you do. Most other forms of internet advertising are there to direct people to your website and if your website isn't up to par than all your other advertising efforts will come to nothing. It's very important to build a quality site. Quality is certainly subjective, but there are many things common to a quality website. It may not be important to have the most beautiful website on the web, but it should meet certain minimum aesthetic standards. Having a professional looking site will help to establish trust with your visitors. Your site should also load quickly into visitor's browsers and have easy to understand navigation so people can find the information they want. Content is extremely important when creating your site as it's content that will bring users to the front door of your site and keep them coming back.
Have Questions? E-mail us Advice@freeadvertisingadvice.org