Pay-Per-View marketing is where the advertiser will pay the PPV network a fee each time their advert is shown. Quite often these are in the form of pop-ups, which have a notoriously bad reputation. The PPV networks in many cases install software on the user’s PC so that when they go to certain websites and adverts will pop-up over the Internet browser. The idea is that advertisers can lure surfers away from the site they went to and buy from their own website instead.

The great benefit of this style of advertising is that you can specifically target certain URLs which gives you great control over your advertising. For example, you could place an advert that pops up whenever somebody goes to the order button of an insurance website. If you are also selling insurance, then this means you have a highly targeted customer who is ready to buy.

Some of you may be thinking that this seems like a superb way of getting traffic since the efficiency in finding buyers is obviously there. However, market forces ensure that the bids for the pop-up ads naturally reflect their worth to the marketer. As competition discovers this form of advertising so does the increase in bids until it reaches equilibrium point.

Some of the most well-known PPV networks are Zango, Adonnetwork, Traffic Vance and Media Traffic. These networks have large numbers of users who have installed their proprietary software on their PCs and so therefore legitimately provide you an opportunity to advertise to them. These users have agreed to the PPV networks terms of service in return for access to premium content or games on the PPV networks website. There is an exchange between the PPV network and user: the user gets free access to this great content and games; the PPV network gets the opportunity to pop-up ads to the user.

An alternative to pop-ups are pop-unders. Another form of PPV type advertising is interstitials. Perhaps you have been to a website to view some content but instead of being taken straight to the content you are taking to a page with an advert instead. On that page you have the option to skip to content or waits to be automatically diverted to the content. This is what is called an interstitials. It is an intermediary advert sandwiched between a link and the intended target page.

In summary, PPV advertising is a method of getting traffic using pop-up, pop under or interstitials. If you have not yet utilised this form of advertising, then I suggest you go to one of the major PPV networks and start to investigate further. We all need to be getting traffic to our websites and the more methods we use the better.

This once novel idea has become ubiquitous, resulting in mass spamming of blogs. There are numerous programs out there — such as Scrapebox — that can help you spam these blog comments. This personally goes against my philosophy, but many people do this nonetheless. Blog owners want to comment on their website that are related to the article they have written. Spam comments tend to be generic and do not add any value to their article. The spammier the comments the less likely your comment will be authorised to show on the blog.

Getting traffic through blog commenting is effective because they are one-way links. Gone are the days where reciprocal links provided value. This form of manipulation was obvious and easy to detect using an algorithm. Blog commenting is a one-way link and is legitimate in many ways. How is Google to know whether the one-way link is a genuine link rather than one manipulated by search engine marketers? It is more difficult to detect the manipulation with a blog comment.

The onus for moderation of blog comments falls on the blog owner and so Google to some extent relies on their judgement over whether the link should be authorised for showing on that particular webpage. It is a kind of delegated decision-making that Google docs in this instance. So getting traffic from blog commenting should be considered less risky than other forms of backlink manipulation.

Please not forget that the link within itself will have readership to. So if it is on topic, then you may well be getting traffic via the link itself and not just its influence on your search engine rankings. I think all too often we forget that people arrive at our websites via other means than Google and the like. Just think how many websites you visit to find information and then squirt off to another website because you say to yourself, “That looks interesting — let me take a quick peek!”

For me personally, I find this part of researching for information on the Internet a real problem! I try to stay focused yet end up bookmarking a whole load of websites that are linked to from the particular page I originally visited. The same applies to blog comments. Quite often I find that when I read an interesting blog article, the comment sections add great additional information and website recommendations. Essentially, when using blog commenting for getting traffic all you are really doing is supplying value added information to the author’s article which will help readers benefit.

The challenge is in finding relevant websites that could appreciate your blog comment as a genuine attempt at adding value rather than spamming their blog. There is a big difference between getting traffic by adding value and spamming. The spamming root involves creating generic text such as, “Loved reading your article. May I use some of its on my own website if I link back to you?” The spammer hopes that leaving a generic comments such as this will help it pass moderation because the comment is a form of flattery and promises to provide a link back to their website. Sadly bloggers realise this is a scam and delete your comment.

So why would you want to create a Press Release? Getting traffic is the answer. If you write yourself an effective Press Release, then you have a great excuse to submit these too many of the Press Release websites which will then syndicate your Press Release to other websites. Many of these Press Release websites allow you to leave in a link back to your website and in some cases containing your anchor text. Just imagine how useful it will be to have 50 odd Press Releases sent out to multiple websites. Getting traffic using this method is excellent.

Some Press Release websites charge for your submission. The top Press Release websites will syndicate your Press Release to a large number of websites and the charge they make is based upon the value this will bring in.

PRweb.com is considered the top Press Release website out there and they have a basic, standard, advanced and premium submission service. The more you pay the more they give so it is up to you to decide how much back linking power you want from them. There is something to suit all budgets.

As an alternative to paying a subscription fee to these Press Release websites, you can use automation software such as PressBot. This is handy piece of software will auto submit your press release to multiple Press Release websites with a click of a button. Using automation to save time in your Internet marketing efforts is vital if you want to have enough time for getting traffic using a variety of methods. Highly recommended.

The structure of a Press Release can take many forms and if you use a tool such as PressBot then it includes sample templates that you can overwrite to save you time. In fact, most of the Press Release websites will give you a clear indication of what is involved in a typical Press Release. After you have created your first Press Release you will have a much clearer idea of how to structure one in future. Like anything, the more you use such a method the better that you will get.

What I like about Press Release submissions for getting traffic is that you can submit these Press Releases all at once. No worries about having to drip feed these Press Releases over time. When you think about it, it is perfectly natural for a spike in the number of backlinks from a Press Release. Timely news of a change in a company product — for example — is likely to be released and is talked about rapidly and Google knows this. They are perfectly aware that Press Releases will result in a sudden influx of back links. Getting traffic via this method is therefore easy, convenient, and you don’t have to have spun Press Releases either.

The reason that social bookmarking has attracted the interest of internet marketers is because each time you bookmark one of your websites, it effectively provide a link back to your site. As we all know, the more links you get to your website the better. Google are likely to index these links and provide you with a little bit of link juice.

There is an issue with this social bookmarking method — namely it is open to manipulation and spamming. There are many tools that will drip feed links to social bookmarking sites in order to get your website is ranked. The value of these social bookmarking links has fallen as a result. Google is well aware that people are spanning the social bookmarking sites and has devalued these links.

Getting traffic with social bookmarking has two sides to it: visitors from the social bookmarking sites themselves and the increase in traffic as a result of your improvement in Web ranking. If you get on the front page of Digg for example this can lead to a huge surge of traffic that could even bring down your server! But a single link from Digg would only have a slight effect on your website ranking. It is the collective power of many links from many different social bookmarking sites that will assist you in getting traffic through a higher website ranking.

Some people use a link from social bookmarking sites to get their webpage rapidly indexed in Google. Google tends to frequently spider social bookmarking sites and so once you place a link to your website, Google spider is likely to follow that link without much delay and find your content.

There are several tools out there that can assist you in creating bulk social bookmarking backlinks. SEnuke is one such product. Another is Bookmarking Demon. SERPassist can also be used. These tools allow you to enter some basic information which is then used to login to the many different social bookmarking websites and place your link. This is likely to save you a lot of time and effort. The effectiveness of this social bookmarking strategy is often debated — as are many of the Internet marketing methods — and Google’s algorithm changes frequently to take into consideration the efforts of the Internet marketing community. If it believes that too many people are using a social bookmarking spanning strategy for getting traffic then they are likely to increasingly devalued the social bookmarking links.

But a link is a link is a link. In my opinion, using a social bookmarking strategy is a great supplement to your other Internet marketing efforts for getting traffic. After all, it is likely a popular website will naturally generate some social bookmarks so why not give it a little boost so that getting traffic to your website happens just a little bit faster!

Let us turn our attention to some of these off-page factors. Firstly, the number of incoming links is paramount. Google considers a link to your website as a vote of confidence for your website. The more votes people have more trust your site will exhibit. At least that is the theory. If your site has 1000 links to its home page and a competitor only had 10, in Google’s eyes this means that your site is popular and popular for a reason. Consequently, it is likely to show high up in the search engine rankings than your competitor.

However, search engine marketers soon caught on to this volume of links necessity and started spamming their homepages with as many links as they possibly could garner. Google caught onto this and modified its algorithm to help combat this link spamming. It started to look at the type of sites these links were coming from. If the site has a link from a site that was considered an authoritative — one that could be trusted — it carried more weight. A single link from an authoritative site could be equivalent to 100 or even more links from a non-authoritative site. Page Rank was used to help determine a website’s importance and authority. So a link from a high PR website is far more significant than links from low PR websites.

An additional algorithmic factor in off-page SEO is the anchor text of the inbound link. “Anchor Text” refers to the text that has been hyperlinked. For example, if a link has the text “weight loss” then Google uses this to suggest that your website is relevant if somebody types in weight loss into their search engine. If you have many backlinks to your website without anchor text of weight loss then it is likely that your page topic is considered important for this term. This helps your ranking.

Let’s look at where we are now then. Off-page SEO looks at the total number of backlinks, how authoritative the sites are where you have these backlinks and what the anchor text is on those links. Using this combination of off-page SEO factors can help Google get around the manipulation of ranking by Internet marketers. After all, Google wants to show the most relevant sites and not those which are just promoted by the smartest search engine marketers.

This has become a battle. The Internet marketers try to stay one step ahead of Google, while Google try to combat the ever evolving marketing techniques so that they show only the best and most relevant content to their users. Off-page SEO has become increasingly complex, as Google’s complex algorithm has evolved. In the early days, all you have to do was place your keywords in a meta keywords tag and you are likely to rank well for that term. But with each algorithmic update, more layers of sophistication and improvement are made.

There are many other factors that go into effective off-page SEO. Many we know about, others are just speculation. But rest assured this mix of off-page SEO factors are numerous and intelligently combined. The link velocity — speed with which links are created — is one of these speculative factors that search engine marketers dispute over whether it exists or not. If you create your links to rapidly, Google may consider that you are spamming and manipulating their search engine results and consequently penalised you by placing your website in their infamous sandbox. Or if you have been building links to your website and all of a sudden they stopped getting built, this sudden change to the link building trend may impact on its rank. Or, the deniers will suggest your drop in rank could be due to other factors. With the increasing complexity of Google’s algorithm, it is hard to single out what specifically is being caused by what.

In any case, off-page SEO is vital if you are looking to rank your website high within the search engines. To stay ahead of the game is a full-time job for many people. However, you can do well by studying well-researched and authoritative search engine marketing training material.

Let us now turn our attention to some typical on-page SEO factors that will influence your ranking. Firstly, I want to turn my attention to the keyword in your URL. Google considers that if the keyword is in your domain name, it is highly likely that the website is very relevant for that keyword phrase. Consequently, it will add this to its ranking algorithm to give your site a boost in the SERPS.

Secondly, a very important ranking factor is having the keyword in your Title meta tag. Your keyword here will give Google a very strong indication of the intended focus for this page. Many SEO’s state that the Title meta tag is the most important on-page factor.

Next, we go to the Description meta tag. It does not harm you to put your keyword in here also. Some experts suggest that the Description meta tag does not carry any weight with Google. However, no one can be certain since Google keeps under wraps its algorithmic weightings.

The Keyword meta tag is another place where you can place your keyword for on-page SEO. Once again, due to overuse and spamming in the past this particular meta tag is not influential any more. But just in case, I recommend you put your keyword in here too.

A very important ranking factor is the keyword density of your landing page. By this, I mean that if for example three out of every hundred words — 3% — contain your target keyword phrase then Google will look at this page as having relevance to that keyword. This will help boost your page in the rankings when somebody types in this term.

It is also important to have your keyword in H1, H2 and H3 tags, with H1 being the most important. Along a similar theme, having your keyword in internal links, external links (using appropriate anchor text) will help your on-page SEO.

My advice to you would be that if you are looking to improve the on-page SEO then you need to find yourself a checklist of factors that go into this form of optimisation, like those found at seomoz. Remember, that while on-page SEO will help your website rank, you do need to have off-page SEO also. Synergistically, they work very well together. But alone their power is diluted.

This brief introduction to on-page SEO will hopefully steer you in the right direction towards improving your websites ranking and assist you in finding out where to conduct your further research into this vital area. Note that these areas have evolved over a period of time and represents the main factors going into Google’s algorithm at this point in time. However, there is a constant evolution in finding the optimal search engine algorithm. So, expect these factors to modify over time.

This form of marketing involves what is known as a “bid auction”. For your target keyword phrase, you set a maximum amount you are prepared to pay each time someone clicks on your advert. The more you pay the higher up in the search engine rankings you will appear. Please note that paid adverts are normally at the very top of the search engine listings and to the side. Also, they are normally highlighted as sponsored listings and are sometimes in a slightly different color.

When pay-per-click marketing first came out, it was a pure auction. The higher bid got the highest rank. Today however, things are rather more sophisticated. Google has the infamous “Quality Score”, which is an algorithm that takes into consideration many factors. These factors include: the click through rate of your advert; the relevance of your ad copy; your landing page quality; your landing page load time; and other factors. The landing page quality score includes: the relevance of your landing page to the target keyword; whether or not you have privacy policy, terms of service, an about us page and other factors. So, pay per click marketing is altogether more complex nowadays.

You may ask why has Google moved away from a pure auction bidding system. They claim it is all to do with improving the “User Experience”. They believe that having quality websites that are relevant to what the search typed in will lead to more people wanting to use Google as a search engine. In the past, there was a lot of bait and switch. People may advertise a particular product, only to direct them to a site that is completely unrelated. They did this to mop up all sorts of search engine traffic after they had exhausted their own niche.

At the time of writing this article, pay per click marketing has three dominant players, namely: Google, Yahoo and Bing. Google has the vast majority of search engine traffic and consequently their Google AdWords platform is the most important. Google knows this and keeps upping the bar regarding the requirements for qualification of joining their Adwords pay per click platform.

A company called Overture was the originator of pay per click marketing. They were acquired by Yahoo! and copied by Google and MSN. Currently, pay per click revenues are the bulk of Google’s profit stream. They account for the vast majority of their ongoing revenue. As competition increases so does the number of bids. In addition, as more and more people go online so Google receives more and more advertising revenue from their pay per click system.

The alternative to pay per click marketing is to have your website ranked within the organic listings. Some speculate that pay-per-click marketing will take up more and more of the organic search listings within the search engines. Thus, the importance of pay per click marketing will endure for those who wish to compete.

Links within the article are often done on anchor text so that you can feed some targeted link juice towards your website using keywords where you wish to rank. If you write enough articles then you send a powerful stream of anchor text laden links towards your website or web page. Consequently, article marketing proves to be an effective way of getting your website is ranked for your target keywords.

Obviously, there is a time cost in writing the article in the first instance. This has led to an explosion in outsourcing to dedicated content writers who churn out articles specifically designed for submission to article directories. The question you have to ask yourself is whether the cost of these articles will be outweighed by the benefit of these extra links. You only have to look at the number of people who do article marketing to realize that this cost benefit equation is normally favorable towards getting these articles written.

In addition to increasing the number of links to your website for search engine ranking purposes, you are also likely to receive some visitors directly from the article itself. Please note that if the quality of the article is very poor, then you are less likely to receive any visitors from it. This does not require explanation.

Article directories are not the only places where you can submit your article for inclusion. However, some of these article directories are considered authority sites by Google due to the sheer number of visitors they receive and volume of content. Many people will also submit their articles to specialist services where your article may appear on other web site owners’ blogs.

A cause of concern for most marketers is the whole area of “duplicate content”. Many marketers believe that you need to create multiple variations of your article in order to still receive link juice benefits from the search engines. They believe that Google will discount the link juice from identical articles. Generally speaking, many of these article marketers will suggest you need at least 50% unique content for each article. This has led to the concept of a “spun article”.

A spun article is one where words are replaced by synonyms. For example, instead of saying, “I really enjoy sunbathing” you would do something like this: {I|We|They} really {enjoy|like|love} {sunbathing|laying in the sun}. This spun sentence has variations that are randomly chosen when you output the article. One article variation may be I really like sunbathing. Another may be they love playing in the sun. I’m sure you get the idea. By spinning words, sentences or paragraphs you can build up unique variations of the same article. The hope is that once you have submitted these variations, Google will consider each article unique and is therefore supply the full link juice for the anchor text within these articles.

This brief introduction to article marketing covers the very basics. There are many courses available that go into far greater detail but this primer should whet your appetite.