Advertising on the Internet

There are now very sophisticated online advertising solutions for anyone wishing to promote their website and services or products in Japan or internationally. There are several different methods to advertising on the internet:

  • Search engine advertising
  • Directory submission
  • Sponsored links

Search engine advertising

One of the most famous search engine advertising programs is Google adwords. This displays a little box with text on the right hand side of Google search results. The system is easy to use but requires some understanding of how to position your advert in relation to a keyword search term. To sucessfully develop a Google ad campaign you need to know what keywords your customers use to find the products they want and then relate these words to your advert. You only pay Google when someone clicks on your advert. The price per click (PPC) is set by bidding in competition with other advertisiers. To get higher positions on the page for a keyword search result you have to increase your bid. This means costs are continually rising as competitors outbid each other for top positions on keywords. The benefits of running a search engine advertising campaign are that you can start to get targeted customers quickly and set the price you want to pay for a click through to your website.

Directory submission

This requires you to pay for inclusion into a search engine directory. The most famous example of this is Yahoo! which will list you in its directory for a yearly annual fee. There are hundreds of other examples of this type of advertising.

Sponsored links

This is similar to directory submission in that you pay for a link on a website. The difference is that the link isn’t part of a search engine or directory but displayed somewhere on a regular website. You get to control the text in the link exactly and can negotiate to update it. The advantages of this are that you can get a lot of links from relevant sites which may have lots of traffic and a good reputation with search engines so this can help boost your traffic and may also increase your rankings in search engine results.

Summary

Internet advertising can be quick and simple with programs like Google adwords but may take a bit of time to research and tune so that you get a good position on the results page. Directory submission and sponsored links also offer ways to increase your traffic and search engine results position.