Online Advertising / SEO Pros and Cons

Online advertising has many advantages and disadvantages. By using methods such as pay-per-click (PPC), adwords, Facebook ads and renting advertising space on websites, businesses can directly influence the amount of traffic they receive. Increased traffic does not automatically mean more conversions to your product, but it is the first step. Once users are already on your website it is the strength of your text and the relevance, informativeness or entertainment value of the content that will result in greater sales. Direct online advertising such as this can be used in conjunction with organic traffic gained through the use of SEO techniques to provide an all-round strategy that brings potential clients to your website.

Pay-per-click marketing

There are three major companies that provide PPC services for advertisers — Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. By using their tools to optimize your web content and the types of ads that are displayed on your website, you can increase organic traffic to your services and products. The way this works is that your ads become part of a database of advertising that is randomly selected from when a user anywhere on the web views related content to the goods and services that you are selling. When setting up your website, you can tailor your text to use common keywords in your field as well as latent semantic indexing techniques to make use of related keywords.

You can also insert adwords when you are in the setup area of your website that will make sure that advertisements are selected from a series of keywords. You can further customize this with code to eliminate the advertisements of your competitors appearing on your own websites, but you cannot influence how the advertisements are selected on others’ websites using the PPC method.

Facebook ads

In the same way that you can take out advertising in newspapers and journals, you can also rent advertising space on Facebook. When users of Facebook view websites, the advertising code in the sections in the side of the page will scan the page for specific keywords, and load advertisements based on the content that it has scanned. It will provide relevant ads according to what the topic is on the page. If you purchase advertising space on Facebook, you can upload advertisements to the system which will assure that your ads are loaded on the pages that people are viewing. The idea is that the advertisement should be interesting enough so that the viewer of the page can click through to your company’s Facebook page.

Renting space on websites

If you are marketing a product that has a niche following, then you might like to consider contacting some of the writers about advertising your goods and services. A good example of this type of online advertising is when makers of high-tech products such as smart phones, PDAs, laptops and computer peripherals contact a technology magazine such as Wired, CNET or PCWorld to advertise their products. Your advertisement should be created with a number of keywords embedded into it, and then when articles pop up on that media you have selected which are related to the product you are offering, your ad may appear on the side of the page. If users are interested in a certain product that is being discussed, then they may click your ad on the side when searching to meet a demand they have. You will receive a small fee for each of these clicks.

Many companies also contact blog writers directly to offer free samples of their product for the writer to create a review that might interest potential clients. This is especially common for highly regarded bloggers in a variety of fields. For instance, if you are marketing a multi-button mouse designed for video games, you might like to contact some of the most popular bloggers in the video gaming industry to review your mouse. Provided you are creating a great product, it is likely that the review will result in a number of conversions to your website.

Advantages of online advertising

The positive aspects of online advertising such as the above is that it is generally much cheaper that traditional forms of advertisements such as newspapers, billboards or television commercial spots. The barrier of entry is quite low and most advertising of this nature costs just a few dollars a month. Compared to the thousands that you could expect to pay for traditional advertising methods, this is a huge advantage.

Disadvantages of advertising on the Internet

Comparedto SEO, there are some basic disadvantages to online advertising. The first one is that many people perceive advertising as undesirable. For instance, when a user clicks on a Youtube video, and they are forced to watch an advertisement for 30 seconds before they can view the video they wanted to watch, they can get frustrated and annoyed. You are after all sucking their bandwidth with the advertisement and this can add up over time. This might have the opposite effect that you are looking for on potential consumers.

Additionally, some readers and users of websites may perceive advertising to be outright “evil” and they use browser addons that block advertisements altogether. The technology has advanced to the stage where your intended target audience may not even see your advertisement and ends up with a clean, ad-free version of the content that you are paying to advertise on. Also, many people are using RSS readers to view blogs on their PDAs and smart phones, which have a minimalist, ad-free interface.

The advantages of organic SEO traffic

The above reasons are why you should not only consider online advertising as part of your sales strategy, but you should also incorporate Search Engine Optimization techniques into your content. You can do this yourself, but by hiring a professional company (such as “Service X”), you can skip a lot of the time spent and the hassles setting it all up. Be sure that you find a company that not only understands SEO principles in general, but that has a proven track record and a portfolio of informative or entertaining content that is marked up for SEO. Internet text should primarily be about the content, but a firm that is aware of the latest technologies and developments in online advertising will also be able to optimize your texts so that you will receive a lot of natural traffic from being ranked by the various indexing software on the web.