SEO Advertisting & Pay Per Click PPC

Advertising can be an easy way to break into the internet but there are many downsides to it. Unless you are running a community based site, have a site offering very unique content, a valuable service or product the traffic usually only comes as long as your paying for it. Of course ad campaigns can also be very expensive to run and maintain so you need to be sure your squeezing everything you can out of it. You should only proceed with a ad campaign if you are positive your site is the best it can be, otherwise you may just be pouring money away. There are thousands of companies on the internet who offer to provide you with ad campaigns, many of which never deliver, do not let any of these points put you off advertising.

If you want quality traffic with affordable prices you are recommended to stick with the major search engines and their partners. Google Adwords, Overture and MSN are all well respected companies which will deliver you the best traffic. All of the forementioned websites use pay per click systems which can be perfect as they drive traffic with keywords you specify directly at your site, these advertisers are all interlinked with the main search engines so you should expect to get the most widespread sections of the population from them. Because they have the traffic numbers to support ad campaigns there can sometimes be bidding wars on popular keywords, I advise you to stay away from popular keywords and do your research. Overture provides a free Keyword Selector Tool which can help you find out how much traffic similiar keywords recieve each month, these are usually a lot cheaper and still provide the same high quality traffic.

As I mentioned before advertising wont necessarily mean a good flow of traffic after you stop paying, other routes of advertising can mean you get listed in a search engines immediately for a set fee. Yahoo offers the ability to pay for a index within their search engine or directory, although your site still needs to abide by the same rules as other sites it gives you the opportunity to get indexed immediately within the search engine, a more subtle way of advertising power. Alternatively you can find quality sites that are related to yours on Sitepoint.com and WebHostingTalk.com who may be willing to put a one way link up for a nominal fee.
You may find websites on the internet offering "banner exchanges", "free traffic" and other such promises, I wouldent look at them twice unless you want to lose out. The traffic they send you is of the worst quality, many of these websites operate bots, own networks of link farms and even pay people to visit your site. This of course means that no one being referred from these sites are actually interested in your content or services, in worst case scenarios you may even end up being banned from search engines due to these malicious sites. Even if they are reputable companies it is hard to judge whether they will work for you, many of the smaller search engine companies simply do not get the traffic to give you value for money.

Get into their eyes, hearts and wallets – A text ads primer

The world of the Internet is full of information. Some people offer it and some people are looking for it. But it can be surprisingly difficult for these two to meet and, more often than not, those that offer the information will have to work very hard in reaching their target audience.
There are millions of web sites on the Internet today. Many of these advertise services and products that will probably never be seen by their target audience because they fail to advertise properly.
From pop-ups to newsletters, Spam and affiliate programs the amount of advertising used by online companies to peddle their wares is simply staggering. With the popularity of search engines one advertising method in particular has become popular: the advertising text link.
But what is this “text link” and why should you care?
A text link is basically a simple advertisement that will appear when any Internet user makes a search on a search engine that offers this service. (All of them do!) When an Internet user creates a search for a particular field of interest the search engine will automatically go through its list of text ads and compare the word(s) entered by the user to the words stored in a special list for the ads created by the people who are promoting their website or products.
The most appropriate ad(s) for the search is selected and displayed offering a direct form of advertisement that will only attract customers interested in the particular topic.
How do you create such a text ad?
Making a text ad is relatively easy. After signing up for any of the search engine ad programs that site will provide you with a simple set of instructions on how to set up advertisements specific to their site. And I promise you. ALL of the different search engines have their own unique way of creating those little text ads.
But in order to create a proper text link ad we have to use so-called “keywords” to equate our ad to search terms.
(Note: Keywords are used by Web surfers to describe what they hope to find when performing a Web search.)
Whenever an Internet user makes a search on the Internet the few words he/she used to make a search are considered keywords. These keywords are stored by the search engine to create statistics of what words are searched often and how many of these words actually lead to specific results compared to similar searches. Searching for 'shoes' for example will yield a completely different result as searching for 'footwear' would even though these topics are almost identical.
In order to be able to display our ad to as many people as we possibly can we will have to make a list of these keywords that apply to their ads including all alternate words, common spelling mistakes and related topics.
Of course to avoid adding hundreds of keywords that will not attract an interested audience (adding the keyword 'sports' to our shoes ad would cause the ad to be displayed more often but would not necessarily mean it would get clicked more often). As a result we have to select the keywords for our ad carefully.
To help us with this task many search engines and companies provide tools that make it possible to take a look at the keyword statistics of the search engines. This allows us to select the best (most profitable) keywords from the list and add these to our advertising campaign.
With a little updating now and then this text link ad campaign can then potentially provide us with a continuing means of long-term income. Be careful though and monitor your spending until you feel comfortable with the advertisement. It is very possible to rack up a very large bill to the Pay Per Click search engines in a short time by using keywords that are too generic and are therefore clicked on constantly, but with no resulting sales. Be selective in your keywords and start with just a few to being with. Build your list up until you are comfortable with your results.

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Determining the Value of Links from Link Renting

Link renting is a means to ‘rent’ the popularity and traffic flow of another site – you pay a monthly fee in return for a text link pointing to your site. In doing so, you can directly and indirectly drive more targeted traffic toward your website.

 
Many industries such as travel, pharmacy, pornography, and gaming have search results which are hyper competitive and require heavy advertising or aggressive SEO techniques. Some niche websites may see an even greater ROI on smart link rentals since many of their competitors may not include link renting in their online marketing budgets.

Some rented links provide great value in direct targeted traffic, whereas some other links provide greater value from the effect they have on search relevancy.

Most links are rented on a monthly basis with an option to renew at the end of the month. Some link prices can be as low as a few dollars a month whereas some can cost thousands per month.
There is no singular one-size-fits-all way to directly assume the value of a link. Most effective marketing has risks associated with it, but you can minimize the risks and maximize your return by breaking the value of the link down into its elements:
1. Direct traffic from link renting
2. Viral effect of advertising
3. Effects of link rentals on search relevancy.

1. Direct Traffic from Link Renting:
Link renting can drive significant direct traffic. The first things you need to know are:
* what is the quality level of the traffic?
* how related is this audience to my product?
* how much traffic does the site receive?
What is the Quality Level of the Traffic:
Where does the bulk of their traffic come from? Someone recently asked about ePilot, the pay per click search engine, at Search Engine Watch forums. Andrew Goodman replied "The first question I would ask myself would be: 'where does ePilot's traffic come from?' Answer isn't clear? Then it would be no surprise that the so-called traffic doesn't convert to anything."
This same concept holds true with any site. If you do not see any quality inbound links that could indicate a problem: or they could get most of their traffic from pay-per-click ads. Whatever the case, if you are going to spend money renting links for traffic, make sure you know where their traffic comes from.
How Related is the Audience:
It will be somewhat of a guesstimate as to how exactly how related the traffic will be, but generally it is fairly obvious when something is on theme or off theme. Some things you may want to consider when determining traffic quality:
* What is the mood / mind set of their traffic? Related traffic may not be traffic that converts. At the 2004 Webmaster World Las Vegas Conference a speaker mentioned that a website about prom hairstyles may not be a good place to advertise prom dresses since girls do not usually look at prom hairdos until after they have already purchased their prom dresses.
* What product should I advertise? Sometimes it makes sense to send traffic to your home page while other times it is more logical to advertise a specific product because it is hot or more related to that particular audience.
How Much Traffic Does the Site Receive:
Most honest webmasters who sell ad space understand that the traffic they receive is a large part of their ad value and should have no problems giving you that information.
Some systems such as Alexa also track traffic, but their statistics can be inaccurate due to their limited distribution.. The best way to use such systems is not for traffic estimates but for comparisons between sites. Note that Alexa has a heavy bias toward webmaster resource type sites. Additionally other companies such as Hitwise may provide more accurate traffic statistics.
From the base traffic level there is a bunch more research you can do to determine how much traffic the site may bring:
* Who currently advertises on the site? You may want to ask them about their advertising experience. Some ad networks such as AdBright show past advertisers average cost per click and ad renewal rates.
* How many ads are on the page? Each additional ad will split up some of the traffic.
* Where does your ad sit? Ads that are tucked away in the footer or in common ad space may get less exposure and drive less traffic. Ads near the content may gain additional exposure and drive more traffic.
* What ad formats can be used? Certain ad creatives may provide greater value than other ads.
* What is the ad turnover rate? Advertisers tend to stay with a site that delivers traffic. A high turnover rate may indicate other problems.
* Have advertisers made any suggestions? Ask if any of their past advertisers made any suggestions or stated that they found any particular setup as being especially helpful.
* Is the traffic seasonal? Some sites have large shifts in traffic volume due to seasonal factors.

2. Viral Effect of Advertising:
Some ads go through click tracking systems which may prevent them from being indexed by search engines. This means that the only value of those particular links would come from direct traffic. Sometimes ads lead to additional exposure though.

3. Effect of Link Rentals on Search Relevancy:
Many links have a greater indirect value than direct value.
When someone links to your site it is seen by search engines as a vote of quality. The anchor text and other page elements such as the page title and headers may also help search engines further classify the link. On image links the image alt text plays the roll of the anchor text.
On the commercial web many links are bought and sold, and thus for search engines to remain relevant they must find ways to regulate link purchasing.
Some of the things you may want to look for when buying links to help maximize your ROI and minimize your risks:
* Are the links direct links? Links that go through an ad server usually do not help build your link popularity.
* Is the page on theme? On topic links from industry hubs are given significantly more weighting in clustering or community based algorithms such as Teoma's topic distillation and Google's Hilltop. If the site allows off topic links then it has a greater chance of having its link popularity blocked or devalued.
* How many links are on the page? If a page sells an unlimited number of ads then the outbound link popularity is split up many ways, and that also could look a bit unnatural to search engines. If there are hundreds of internal links on a page then each additional link will be getting an exceptionally small share of link popularity.
* What anchor text can I use? If you can use descriptive anchor text then the value of the link is greater since the link text helps search engines understand what your site is about.
* What is the cost difference between site wide and individual page links? Generally site wide links may drive significantly more direct traffic, but likely they do not provide much additional weight beyond a single link from the best page on the site.
* What is the PageRank of the page? Generally many people place too much value on PageRank, but a higher PageRank does equate to greater connectivity and slightly additional value.
* Who links to the page and to the site? If the page or site is well connected within your topical community then search engines will likely consider links from it as being far more important than links from pages which are not as well connected.
Summary:
To best determine the value of a link you need to consider both its direct and indirect effects. Generally it is best to buy on topic links since they provide both direct and indirect value.

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