Banner advertising and Pay-per-click ads :

Banner advertising and Pay-per-click ads :

Search marketing is an excellent for targeting relevant, active prospects looking for a product or service. However, other forms of online advertising and public relations should not be ignored due to their potential for developing brands and reaching large audiences effectively, two most common of them being Banner advertising and Pay-per-click ad campaigns.

Banner advertising: Banner advertising and other forms of online advertising offer good opportunities to develop a brand image without the creative restrictions imposed by search marketing. There can be a diverse range of websites that will run your adverts, from large independent sites to smaller sites will tend to operate through an advertising or affiliate network.

For effective web marketing, these are some of the practices one can follow:

• Sourcing the most appropriate news, content and press release websites for your market
• Evaluating and selecting websites that offer the best advertising value for you company
• Producing advertising copy and press releases, as well as planning, implementing and evaluating entire online
• advertising and public relations campaigns.

CSS allows for smaller file sizes

By taking styles out of the HTML page and putting it into a standalone (imported) style sheet (CSS file), you can reduce the overall amount of code in your web pages. Pages with less code have smaller file sizes and Google prefers pages with smaller file sizes (many other search engines do too).

Though Google doesn't offer specific advice on this matter, the search engine optimisation community is generally agreed that 100KB is a good upper limit for page sizes.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising:

*Pay per click advertising is an on-going and growing arsenal for all entrepreneurs world wide. Whether your have a small business or a large business, buying a search engine placement is definitely the way to go.” (Martin Lemieux)

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) offers your website an opportunity to advertise sponsored listings on pages served by the main search tools when a user searches on a specific keyword related to a product or service. Effectively you can buy your way to the top of the search results within hours.

This is therefore highly targeted advertising, with payment only being made once the user clicks through to your site from the PPC listing. This sector has grown rapidly in the UK since 2000 and is now dominated by two major players:

Google adwords: taking advantage of Google’s position as a major destination site on the web, this service provides coverage of Google, Ask Jeeves and a network of smaller content sites.

Overture: owned by Yahoo, this tool has established a wide coverage of many popular UK search tools such as AltaVista, AOL, HotBot, Lycos, MSN Search, Tiscali, Wanadoo and Yahoo.

Running a successful pay-per-click campaign

Pay-per-click advertising is becoming more competitive as an increasing number of companies compete for top positions on the main search and consequently in some market sectors, only those with deep pockets can buy the best positions. However, used sensibly, a PPC campaign can be extremely effective for several key reasons:

• It's immediate - you can set up a campaign immediately with Google and within a few days on Overture. Set up requires very little investment and, depending on the nature of your market, pay- per- click can prove to be very cost effective, making it realistic for any size of business. You can also control activity and spend online, making it a flexible tool for promoting business objectives such as market penetration, sales promotions and catering for seasonal variations.
• It's measurable - conversion rates from pay-per-click leads can be measured by adding tracking code to a site, so   you are able to calculate the cost per sale and conversion rates that pay-per-click is giving you. This makes it very   easy to justify and monitor responses compared to other forms of advertising. You can also monitor click through   rates (adverts served v adverts clicked) to measure the effectiveness of your advertising messages.