March 22nd, 2010 by Nick

A few years ago, when banner and pop-up advertising reached an apex of use- notice the avoidance of the term ‘popularity’ there- the online community responded by producing and using ad blocking software.

The better browsers were quick to adapt pop-up blockers into the fabric of their software, and seeing one of these ads is now pretty rare. The only time many of us are even aware that pop-up blocking is in action is when a link we’ve clicked on and actually want to see gets caught up in it. This isn’t that common and almost nobody disables the blocking software. The consequences are just too irritating. Now and again a pop-up hosted directly on page gets through, but the age of this style of advertising is well and truly over. It no longer has any relevance to decent SEO or good internet reputation management.

Banner ads, however, are still very much alive and kicking. Google makes millions from its AdSense and AdWords programs and a pretty high percentage of sites you’ll visit today will have banner ads or sidebar ads (banner ads by another name, really) on them. Search engine optimisation and marketing savvy types will put a lot of thought into the placement of a banner ad if they include paid advertising in their strategy at all. One reason is that you have to pay and may not see a return, Another is that the link will probably have little SEO value. The last is banner blindness.

Do you actually look at the ad banner of a website you’ve just navigated to? Probably not. Research has shown that very few seasoned internet users do. The brain knows that the information it’s after isn’t up there in that flashy rectangle and skips straight over it. There is a partial exception on search engines results pages, because it knows it should be scanning to find a link, but banner blindness is a well established and well understood trend.

Advertisers have responded by placing ads elsewhere on the page. Right hand sidebars are the usual. Opinions in the search engine optimisation and web marketing world vary on the question of whether this gets round the blindness problem. Some more proactive users have responded by downloading ad content blockers that remove anything not directly hosted on the page from view, and we will probably see more of these in the next few years.

However, all this tells us for SEO is that it is increasingly difficult to get paid online advertising to pay dividends. Other link building strategies are going to be more robust and give a better return now and into the near future. Social media marketing is the way forward. The links built through SMM are generally favourably indexed by search engines and trusted by those reading the page as well.

You don’t have to pay social media sites, but SMM isn’t a quick and cheap advertising solution. It takes time and subtlety to accomplish good results. However, that’s the direction the web is moving in. Away from paying money for ads and towards generating quality content and building value into websites. Actually, it’s pretty good news for those prepared to create a great website.

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