Online advertising is now an important component of some of the most successful branding campaigns. In just 10 years it has overtaken cinema, surpassed radio and is on target to reach outdoor in terms of advertising spend. It now reaches 61% of the UK’s population – that’s 28.7 million people. Click below for some of the key reasons for this phenomenal growth.

General Search engine optimization (SEO) Tips and Tricks

Search engine optimization is a potentially frustrating thing to get to grips with! Just when you have learned something new, things change and you have to go back to school again. However there are some fundamental tips and tricks that have stood the test of time and seem to be wise moves despite the regular updates to the ways search engines rank your website.

Firstly you must consider your website from several angles. The sites that rank well in the SERPs (search engine results pages) pay very close attention to the quality of their website and the content it holds. Many webmasters make a common mistake; they create hundreds or thousands of pages to target all conceivable keywords that people may be searching for. In reality, it is typically one or two pages which bring the majority of traffic to a site – this could be a really good article or some new piece of information relevant to your niche. Narrowing your SEO to a select few search phrases is more likely to yield you traffic than trying to cover all the possible terms you can think of. A good example of this can be seen at http://www.ambatchdotcom-seocontest.name. It is a relatively small site, yet is highly targeted for the keyterms ambatchdotcom seocontest.

Monitor your web traffic! It might seem obvious, but many people only check visitor numbers and do not make proper use of their web statistics facilities (if you don’t have any – ask your web hosting company why not!). The important things to keep an eye on include checking which search engines are sending you visitors, which other domains and website are linking to you, what your ratio between first time and repeat visitors is, what routes visitors tend to take through your website, which pages are the most popular (and if possible, ‘why’) and how many page views each visitor tends to have during their visit. This last statistic is often called ‘page views per session’ by the software packages that manage these numbers.

Keeping records of these figures is important and analysing the information you gain from them can make the difference between wasting your time on irrelevant work or applying yourself to the parts of your site that will broaden your reach. Knowledge is power and knowing which topics your visitors enjoy reading means you know what to write about next!

Keep your SEO ethical. This means avoiding spam and other potentially suspicious marketing tactics. This is important not only because everyone hates spam – search engines are getting very clever indeed and if they make any connections between your website and these types of techniques you risk being blacklisted and having your hard work made redundant. It is far worse to be blacklisted in an engine than to have to wait for your ranking to increase over time. Blacklisted domains seldom ever get allowed back in the rankings.

As a process, search engine optimization is not easy to complete. You have to consider that your site should be appealing not only to web users but also to other webmasters so that you gain additional links. The more backlinks you gain from other websites, the higher your search engine ranking will increase. If nobody wants to reference your website then you are unlikely to ever gain the popularity you deserve.

Tobias Clover