A well-planned and implemented web advertising strategy is essential to your success on the net!

You can have the most beautiful website on the planet and yet have virtually no traffic. When you’re competing with millions of other sites in your niche, you need to carefully and thoroughly analyze your demographics, then target your potential customers by putting together a web advertising strategy that is customized to the needs of those visitors. There are always many avenues to putting the word out where it counts. The trouble is discovering which venues are most cost effective. You also need to understand how the search engines work when their spiders go out crawling, what they’re looking for and what they don’t like.

Here’s an overview of what needs to be considered as you plan your web advertising strategy.

You naturally want to start getting visitors as soon as possible, but don’t jump the gun and submit your site to the search engines if all you have are a few pages of sales material. Submitting too soon may hurt your search engine rankings immediately. Wait until your site has plenty of content and relevant links. This way, when the spider trolls your site, it records the amount of information available for free versus pure product sale pages. Sites with plenty of free information are deemed more valuable to a reader searching on your subject and your ranking increases accordingly.

Which brings us to content. Content is an important element of any web advertising strategy. Let’s say you are selling kid’s furniture. What type of information will your visitor – and potential customer – find valuable? Remember, the longer a visitor hangs at your site, the greater your conversion rate will be. In this scenario, you’ll want tons of information pertaining to kids. Some categories you might want to fill out include safety tips, kid’s story book reviews (Newberry Award winners always sell well), craft projects for kids and the like.

Putting links within your content articles is a great way to improve your search engine ranking, so long as the link leads to a topic directly related to your article. For example, you have an article pertaining to choosing a nursery monitor. Put in a couple of links which lead to a consumer report on nursery monitors or more detailed information on a specific aspect. This is an excellent web advertising strategy that doesn’t cost a penny, but drives traffic to you. The higher the quality of the linked site, the more favorably it reflects on you!

Google accounts for about 75% of all searches, and running an AdSense campaign pays. Google does all the work for you, ‘reading’ each page and finding the most relevant products and services. So, as you construct each page, get all your ducks in a row first! Every item on that page should be closely related. This allows Google to fine-tune its ads to the most targeted ads and thus increases your ROI. Always a good thing!

If you have a free e-newsletter, make sure you offer it on every page, in roughly the same place on each. You never know when a visitor will click through to a page other than your home page. You can bet that is often the case. This web advertising strategy helps you capture a readership, keeping you fresh in your visitor’s minds while affording you another opportunity to pitch a sale, tactfully.

Another money-making web advertising strategy comes in the form of affiliate ads. For your kid’s furniture website, develop some affiliate relationships with other sites selling products and services of interest to your visitor, but which are not directly competing with you.

Depending on your site topic, a blog can help create buzz in your community. People love the interaction and may start visiting your site more frequently, just to see what’s new. Again, this leads to more sales.

You can see how a thoughtful, search engine savvy web advertising strategy can have you hit the ground running!