Website advertising is becoming extremely popular with small to mid-size business as advertising online is a cost effective way to get your brand or product out to the most amount of viewers without breaking your bank. With millions upon millions of people using the internet every day, it’s no wonder why advertisers have flocked towards website advertising, instead of the traditional methods of advertising, such as, television, magazine and newspaper ads.

Many website creators and business developers create and invest their time and money into beautiful websites and sit and wait for traffic to flock to their websites. However, this is not how the internet website traffic works. Just like the real world, it takes promotion and advertising to make people aware of your business or product. Even the best products will not sell if the owner of the product does not have an effective marketing strategy. Websites are exactly the same way. Consider your website as a piece of property in the internet realm. How will people know about it? If you do not tell people about your beautiful “property”, then your property, or website, will sit in the dark. Maybe a few people will stumble upon your site once in awhile, but those people will quickly leave because your site was not targeted towards what they were looking for.

Organic search engine traffic is the most cost effective way to drive traffic and advertise your website to the public. Organic traffic means that a user that is browsing a search engine such as Google or Yahoo goes to your website based on a keyword or phrase. Targeted marketing is when marketing companies show advertisements to users in a specific market segmentation and niche. Focusing on organic traffic for website advertising is good because the consumers, or target audience, are coming to your website. Instead of you having to chase consumers and traffic, the traffic is coming to you. This means that the traffic is searching for an answer or needs more information and will captivated longer if they search for information and happen to go to your website via a search engine.

Now that you know that advertising is important for website promotion, let’s go into various ways to advertise your website via organic search engines without breaking your budget.

Hiring a Search Engine Optimization Specialist

If you have the budget and do not have any knowledge about website promotion, hiring an outside Search Engine Optimization Specialist (SEO Specialist) is a good way to optimize your website so that you can get organic search engine traffic. An SEO Specialist will view your website and come up with a marketing plan to increase your website rank so that more people will come to your website (which maybe in turn increase sales and traffic). Usually, they will go over your goals and what keywords that you’d like to rank for. After viewing your website and reviewing your goals, the SEO expert will create a plan to ensure your website starts to rank well. Usually, fees are based on the amount of time and how experienced the specialist is. Also, other considerations for total fees will be based on what exactly the specialist uses to rank your website. If they decide to buy a few links, then you will have to pay more.

Google Adwords is an internet based advertising solution to promote your website via the Google search engine. Many small companies that have a website and want to drive traffic to their website use Google Adwords to have an affordable solution to advertising. Sometimes, radio ads, TV commercials and newspaper ads are not a viable solution for smaller companies as these media outlets are too expensive. Using internet based advertising is a direct approach and could have a higher conversion rate for your company as said earlier, “you are not chasing customers, customers are seeking you”. So how does Google Adwords work? First, you have to set up an account with Google. This includes adding money into your account so that you can pay for keywords to bid on. Next, you will create an advertisement that will show on the right side of the Google search engine (or on people’s websites). The last step is bidding on a few keywords. Bidding on keywords means that anytime someone searches for the keyword you are bidding on, your website advertisement will show for that keyword. For example, if you have a cell phone company and have a successful bid on the keyword “cell phone key chains”, your website’s advertisement will show for that specific advertisement. So how much does this cost you? The cost to the advertiser will depend on the keyword and how many times a person clicks on the advertisement. Advertisers are only charged when a browser clicks on their website and stays on their website for duration of time. Other website advertising solutions that are similar to Google Adwords are Microsoft’s (BING) AdCenter and Yahoo’s Advertising Network.

If you do not have the budget for advertising using Google Adwords, or hiring a specialist, why not try websites advertising by yourself? Besides organic traffic, advertising on social media is a viable way to advertise your website to millions of people. With websites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, it is easy to show your website to multiple traffic sources. However, adding friends at a rapid rate might be considered spam and it could lead to devastating effects to your website. The other aspect of advertising with social media is that it’s not targeted towards an audience so you will have to communicate with many more people to get the same affect from organic search and direct advertising.

Lastly, if you are a bit tech savvy, you can also try SEO by yourself. There are many great free website adverting and online market tools to learn about ways to rank your website well within a search engine. However, once you have the knowledge and ability, you will be able to promote your websites without the help of others and can save a considerable amount of money. With internet website advertising, the possibilities are endless!