Since the inception of Internet marketing there has been one standby tactic that has worked exceptionally well to boost online presence – and that’s banner advertising, especially the 468 x 60 pixel sized graphical banner.

Yes, online banner advertising still remains a foundation of many Internet marketing campaigns as a well-designed banner can motivate users to learn more about a product and introduce a brand’s identity to thousands of consumers.

No longer static billboards, banners now boast both animation and interactivity to engage viewers and extend the impact of every impression. Now in direct competition with rich media, the 468 x 60 pixel banner has remained high on the list of online entrepreneurs.

In order to be successful at banner advertising the question of relevancy must be analyzed. While most existing ad networks do enable advertisers to customize campaigns using a rather basic process of eliminating categories of business where they do not want to appear, very few advertisers actually do so. Some just want maximum exposure at any cost.

Unlike static or mildly animated GIF banner advertisements typically used in the 468 x 60 banner, rich media can enable users to interact with the banner. Some popular rich media ads are created with Flash technology and can generate clicks. Development and maintenance for interactive advertising however is generally more costly and typically out of budget for smaller companies.

While many online marketers are seeing the glamour of interactive advertising, banners remain a useful tool for cost-conscious marketers looking to increase brand awareness. The quality of banners and the understanding of where they will appear are important in any company’s decision to implement them in their advertising campaigns.

Good blog writing is an art, it requires attention to detail, good grammar, good punctuation, correct spelling and great content. So what is the single biggest mistake a blogger can make when writing a blog post that is supposed to be optimized for search engines?

Basically it is to sacrifice any of these requirements in order to use what they think are high paying, low competition and high inquiry keywords or keyword phrases that simply do not fit into the content of their post under the misconception that they believe this is a good website search optimization strategy.

The flaw in focusing on keywords of this type rather than content is that the search engine operators actually look for and value good content i.e. the content that flows nicely, has correct spelling, good punctuation etc.

They do not value nonsensical paragraphs that are clearly written to attract search engine attention rather than to meet the requirements of visitors to the website that have arrived there for a specific purpose, to find great content and information on their topic of choice.

You only have to think about what happens when someone arrives on your website and either cannot make sense of what you have written or, equally as important, cannot find the information they are looking for. They simply leave again and go and look for a different website or blog that does provide the information they want in a format they enjoy and in a place they can find it.

The term for what I am discussing is the bounce rate, the time a visitor spends on your website and how many pages they visit. If they only look at the first page or leave almost as soon as they arrive then you will register a high bounce rate, 100% basically says that they have not found what they came for and left immediately, a more acceptable level is 50%, but should be lower if possible, and that should be the minimum target any webmaster or blogger aspires to achieve.

Writing your blogs or websites with the objective of providing useful information that is well written and with appropriate keywords that describe the actual content of your site will result in far better search engine optimization than selecting keywords that are inappropriate or cannot be converted into sensible paragraphs of written text that can be understood and enjoyed by your visitors.

If you do your keyword research thoroughly and with this view in mind there is a high probability that you will find keywords that are high paying, low competition, with sufficient numbers of inquiries and that do fit with your content in a sensible and coherent fashion. The extra effort required to do this will ultimately reward you with the associated benefit of creating more traffic who in turn become loyal visitors that come back to revisit your site and are likely to recommend to others.