Thread: Tips regarding Banner Exchange

As an alternative to link-exchange, banner exchange is a good way to get more traffic on your site, and increase your brand awareness. But how exactly does it work?

The main idea is that you show on your website ads for other websites, and they show yours. Regarding SEO, the crawlers only read the alt tag, which is similar to the title tag you use for link-exchange. They can’t read or interpret your banner (not even if it only has text on it). So banner exchange is not mainly purposed for keyword optimization, but for increasing your brand awareness and driving traffic to your site.
There are two ways you can do it. Either by direct contacting another website, who is willing to exchange banners with you, or by joining a banner exchange network. The second method is by far better, because it skips you all the hard work for finding and contacting other websites.

By joining a banner exchange network, your banner will enter their ad server network (ad servers are used to count impressions, visitors, rotate banners, and so on). You simply insert a HTML code to your website, and the ad server does the entire job.
There are a lot of banner exchange programs. You can simple do a Google search, and they’ll show up.
Most of them though, show your banner only 50% of the number of times that you show others banners (the impressions, or the number of times the banner is displayed on your website is counted, not the click-through-rate). So as your site’s number of visitors increases, so does the page-views on your site. This will reflect in the fact that you will increase the number of times you’ll show other’s banners on your site, and so get your banner shown more times on the network’s websites.

The good thing for banner exchange is that it’s free. But it has its disadvantages also. On most of the banner exchange networks, you can’t control on which websites you banner will be displayed, or which banners will be displayed on your website. This is a big problem, because your site could be associated with the content of those sites, and your company could be associated with everything that appears on your site. And you can end up showing the logo of a shoe manufacture company, near the logo of your IT website?
Some good banner exchange programs allow you to choose what type of websites you want your banner to be placed on, and also the categories of the websites that you want to be places on your website, but you can’t choose or exclude websites individually.

Here are some of the top banner exchange websites:

UK Banner Exchange – Part of a large banner exchange network, the system offering 8:10 ratio is used by more than 30.000 websites in the UK, and displays almost a billion banners per year.
Hit4Hit – It’s a free 1:1 UK banner exchange network. Also, they give you up to 1500 initial banner exposures to start your campaign.
Impressionz – Used by about 68.000 website owners, they offer 6:10 ratio and 2500 free impressions upon sign-up.

I'm not sure that the count is correct.