Internet Marketing, SEO and Site Promotion
Internet marketing and online branding are both highly essential to any business. With a greater population of the world's market surfing the net for information, the internet presents a suitable platform to send your message across. The sole aim of Internet Marketing is to direct the neccessary traffic to your website.
How Do You Do This?
There are several ways of marketing on the internet, some, not as effective as the others, but they are all aimed at making your website more visible on the net. The most popular methods include;
Banner Advertising
Email Marketing
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Directory Listing
Link Building
Search Engine Optimization and Submission
Banner Advertising
Banners are probably the most widely used marketing method, as has been the case for almost 2 decades. Banners are quite effective in sending out your message. A well planned banner campaign can yield amazing results in a short period.
The first stage is the design and development of the banner. In designing your web banner, certain factors need to be taken into consideration;
- Layout- Your web banner should have a design layout that not only looks good, but also sends out the right message. It may come as a surprise to most people, but research has shown that; beauty has the least impact on click-through rate.
Message and action make the greatest impression! Choice of words in the the ALT tag is also important, as this is what is displayed in the image box prior to the loading of the banner.
- Execution and Placement- ad effectiveness depends on execution and placement. Choosing the right ad-space for your banner will ensure maximum visibility. Most Ad networks (Us, For Instance) represent many publisher websites that sell ad space. The
sites are usually grouped into categories such as Automotive, Business
& Finance, Careers, Children & Family, Computing, Ecommerce &
Portals, Games, Health & Fitness, Home & Garden, Movies, Music,
News, Reference & Education, Sports and Travel. This allows
advertisers to reach broad audiences readily through run-of-category and
run-of-network buys.
Location, daily visitor traffic, and cost per impression (CPM) should be taken into consideration when deciding who to use for your banner ad-campaigns. Many websites sell Ad Space here in Ghana, but not all of them ensure maximum visibility of your website
- Size- one thing to remember is that size matters. The current standards set forth by the Internet Advertisers Board (IAB) are as follows;
| Rectangles and Pop-Ups |
| 300 x 250 IMU - (Medium Rectangle) |
| 250 x 250 IMU - (Square Pop-Up) |
| 240 x 400 IMU - (Vertical Rectangle) |
| 336 x 280 IMU - (Large Rectangle) |
| 180 x 150 IMU - (Rectangle) |
| Banners and Buttons |
| 468 x 60 IMU - (Full Banner) |
| 234 x 60 IMU - (Half Banner) |
| 88 x 31 IMU - (Micro Bar) |
| 120 x 90 IMU - (Button 1) |
| 120 x 60 IMU - (Button 2) |
| 120 x 240 IMU - (Vertical Banner) |
| 125 x 125 IMU - (Square Button) |
| 728 x 90 IMU - (Leaderboard) |
| Skyscrapers |
| 160 x 600 IMU - (Wide Skyscraper) |
| 120 x 600 IMU - (Skyscraper) |
| 300 x 600 IMU - (Half Page Ad) |
Email Marketing
Email is essential in developing and maintaining customer relationship, and a vital tool for creating brand awareness. But just as with most other tools, you have to know how to use it, and avoid "abusing it". Certain factors such as; when to send email, who to send to and how to market it have become popular concerns. Effective email marketing techniques provides an efficient way of achieving a high response rate for low costs.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization is probably the most effective way to get your website noticed these days. Most people use Search Engines, most notably Google, Yahoo, and Ask to search the net for information. After your site has been developed, it is neccessary to optimize its pages to make them "Search Engine Friendly" and submit them to the engines for indexing.
In doing so, you will ensure that your website appears on Search Result Pages (SERP) for searches conducted on keywords relating to the services you provide.
How Search Engine Optimization Works >>
Directory Listing
A directory, or "Web directory" in this case, as the name implies, contains listings of website across the globe. These directories are usually divided into categories. Directories are also useful in ensuring that your site is seen because most search engines use the information in some of these directories to update their databases. It is common knowledge that Google for instance, uses the Open Directory to update it's database of indexed pages. Yahoo, likewise uses the Yahoo search directory. |
