Web Hosting and Reseller Account Provider.

I have been doing web hosting and reseller web hosting for about 4 years now and I have noticed lately or maybe I haven’t been paying so much attention to the advertising and marketing world on the internet. But out of pure frustration I am writing this article to warn new people starting out and maybe a few old timers as well.

Often an online marketer overlooks important considerations when deciding to pay money to advertise on a particular web site. I recently received an email from a company, who will remain nameless, which contained the following bold statement;

“I just wanted to let you know the Top Banner could be available for February 1st: $700/mo ….Currently our Canadian targeted site shows on page 1of Google.com search for ‘blah blah blah’ “

So how do you know exactly what to pay for a particular opportunity? So I decided to show people some easy to use tools out there to help narrow down who is worth that much money.

First off I have a nice webmaster tool page on my site http://www.hsphereclub.com/web-hosting-resellers-web-master-tools.html . I use this whenever I need some info about a site I may choose to advertise with. The scripts are courteously of http://www.iwebtool.com .

After plugging in the above mentioned advertiser into the Alexa rank tool Alexa.com shows this person who sent me the offer has a “traffic rank of: 43,871”.Hmmm not bad I say to myself. But when I check alexa page for my own ranking I find “Hsphereclub.com has a traffic rank of: 536,334”. Does this mean I can charge $650 per/mo for a banner on my site???? They also hinted that the banner space that just opened now has a number 1 spot on Google for a certain "search term". After that I checked my site against this "search term" and found it was placing about page5 or 6 on Google for that search term. Which in previous weeks was at a placement of page 25 or 26 for that same search term. So obviously my site has been climbing up the ranks on its own, and I don’t recall paying for any banner ads. I must just be lucky I guess. ;)

This brings me to my second tool used to investigate if this site would help my google placement “The GooglePage Rank Checker” and the “Page Rank Prediction” tools. Again I plug the site into these tools and see the advertiser has a nice Page Rank of 6 out of 10 and a future page rank of 5. My site comes in at a low page rank of 2 with a future of 3. But still there site does not meet the criteria you would expect from someone charging $700 dollars a month for a banner ad.

Does a banner ad affect your Google placement?

The answer NO!!!!
Banner ads will not help your search engine position effort!

Why?

The best way to be ranked highest in Google is through the anchor text in your inbound links. Having a banner may be good to bring click through traffic to your site but will not improve your page rank or placement on Google. But the site you choose to put a banner on should have a lot more traffic then the one mentioned above to justify spending money on.

If you want to learn more you should read more about google friendly web sites here at this point if you haven't all ready done so: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.

I hope this all makes sense, in my opinion the sales person who sent me the email really doesn't have enough traffic coming to there site to justify even 7 dollars a month. The whole object of being on the first or second page for search results is to NOT pay for advertising. If you want spend money on advertising wouldn't it be better to start a Google adword campaign http://www.google.com/ads/ or approaching some of the big fish like FaceBook.com or YouTube.com to place advertisements with? And how much do they charge for advertising? I will discuss more on this in my next article.

Trent Fergusson
http://hsphereclub.com/canadian-web-hosting-article-banners-exposed.html