A webmaster looking for some quality traffic to the website, is many a times confronted with a lot of varied and sometimes confusing options. There is banner advertising, Pay per click, conventional media campaigns and finally organic search engine optimization campaigns.

So what is the best method? In this article I will try to being forth the merits & demerits of each form of marketing strategy.

Banner Advertising:

Paying $15 for a 1000 impressions on a high traffic website. Sounds like good exposure for a low price? It is! After all you will have a 1000 unique people view your banner. But how many actually end up clicking on it, and how many more actually end up buying stuff from you? According to most industry sources the average click through rate of a banner campaign is 0.38%. So you get 3.8 people to click on your banner for $15. And the rate of conversion is typically 1 to 5%. So how much do you actually spend before a person buys from you? You do the math. It appears quite a lot to me.

What about those popup ads? Or the ones that keep popping up and refuse to close? Wouldn’t that give you more exposure? Some banner sellers would love to make you believe that. Well its not the case. Ever had one very stubborn popup refusing to close? How irritating is that? I would never even buy anything from that kind of banner advertiser. Its downright irritating to have banner popup in the face when you are in the middle of surfing for some useful information.

Pay Per Click Search Engines:

The internet boom may be over, but for search engines the boom may have just begun. Many engines, the most famous being Overture and now Looksmart have turned to this model. Pay per click model makes you pay for the amount of actual clicks your site link receives and not for the number of exposures. Sounds good? It sometimes is very effective too. For starters, you get quality traffic, cause the people who click on your link would have searched for a term relevant to you. However it can be pretty expensive. Overture makes you bid on the term you want to rank high on, and trust me sometimes the bids get pretty high. Looksmart on the other hand charges you $0.15 for each click through you get. Pretty expensive, if you have a small budget.

However, if this scheme appeals to you, you are better off asking a SEO to implement it for you, instead of trying it yourself, since it can get pretty expensive for competitive terms.

Conventional Media Campaigns:

News paper advertisements, Posters, Television and Radio adverts, all come under traditional forms of advertising. However for most medium sized websites Television and Radio ad’s are way beyond budgets. And for an internet firm, it is of paramount importance that the newspaper or magazine reader who views his ad, remembers the website name. And as most experiences marketing guys will tell you, for that to happen you need to advertise regularly for a period of time. You add up the cost for an effective campaign and it will work out to be quite a sum.

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization campaigns include keyword analysis, study of competition, optimizing your website for the chosen keywords, submitting to search engines and directories and repeating the entire process and submissions over the period of time. Sounds quite a lot? It is. But is it expensive? Well, it varies for the kind of optimization you require, but trust me, at the end of the day, it is cheaper than most of the methods we discussed above.

Can you do it yourself? Yes you can, if you have the time. Should you train somebody inhouse? No, I don’t think so. You will end up paying him a monthly salary which will definitely work out to be more than what you will pay a qualified SEO expert, and more often than not, he wont know all the tricks and methods a professional SEO would use.

What about those quite cheap off the shelf softwares that promise so much? Well, they don’t choose your keywords, they don’t optimize the website, they don’t study your traffic trends over the period of time, and finally they don’t change with the rapidly changing algorithms and guidelines of search engines.

How about the traffic quality? Is it inferior to the traffic generated by banner ads or newspaper adverts? On the contrary. People had to have searched for a keyword relevant to your website before clicking on the link. Hence the traffic generated, contrary to the myth, is highly targeted.

And lastly, Are Search engine optimizers expensive? Not at all, especially in comparison to the other forms of marketing. And a good SEO, will help you drive much more quality and sustained traffic to your site than any of the other mediums would be able to...

Hope you enjoyed reading this article... Look forward to hearing from you. So until next time... Happy Surfing!!!

Author - Vishal Sampat

Convonix Inc is a search engine optimization firm that offers customized SEO optimization and PPC campaign management solutions. We manage hundreds of SEO and PPC campaigns. Our clients include Web design firms, adveritising agencies, fortune 500 companies and SMEs. Other internet marketing companies can also Outsource SEO to us in India.

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