Web Advertising Rising While Newspapers Fail

According to research firm eMarketer, Internet advertising will grow this year while traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television continue to fall. US spending stands to reach a total of over $23 billion this year with yearly increases of over 10%. Cost effectiveness and accountablity are some of the reasons cited for the steady increases while claims that net advertising is recession proof are also heartening in these apparently bleak economic times.

Paid search ads through Google, Yahoo and smaller engines and directories will make up nearly half of that spending while banner and classified ads will comprise nearly 35% of the total. Video advertising also stands to grow by almost 50% per year.

Linking Strategies For Traffic and Robots

To achieve any level of traffic to your website, you need to develop a series of inbound links from relevant sites and dedicated web directories. The links themselves will drive a certain amount of traffic to your site, depending on how busy that site is, but the true value of that inbound link will be in the 'link popularity' your site will achieve. Google robots and other search engines will view these links and rank your site higher in its database because of the perceived popularity of your site.

It's important to choose relevant links to your site and not just random link farms whose generality and lack of relevance can actually hurt your site. The best way to find relevant and well-weighted directories and link sites is to do a google search within your niche. For example, for a vancouver island tourism site, google 'vancouver island tourism directory'. For an Ottawa tattoo studio, search for 'Ottawa search engine' and 'Tattoo link directory'. The top hits listed are the sites you want to be affiliated with, for their Google relevance will transfer itself to your site.

There was a time when most link and web directories offered free linking, but sadly those days are gone. Most of the most important directories these days charge for listings, anywhere from $30.00 to $250.00 per year. Do some research and find the best opportunities for your particular niche with the best return on investment.

Linking is important. Don't ingore it.

What do people have against meta tags.

Through my work with Vingo.ca, my Vancouver Island Travel Search Engine, I regularly have to dip into a website's source code to pull the company's description from their meta tags. Fully half of these sites, even the pretty ones, have ignored their meta tag keyword and description fields, the first step in effective search engine optimization.

Your meta keyword field should be littered with significant and descriptive words about your business, page or product, preferably words that appear in the text of the site. Separate them with commas and string them together. (ie., web, web tech, web tech blog, web blog,...). Your meta description should be a sentence, (a long sentence), also full of those same keywords but in an easy to read description. This is how you'll be identified by the search engines.

Visit my site at Up Your Media. Don't be shy, dip into my source code to see what a properly optimized meta stack looks like.

Programs like Dreamweaver make it easy for anyone to build a website, but too often these budget priced websites, though they may look good, have forgotten the basics, making it far more difficult for customers to find you. If it's worth building, it's worth promoting.