Banners, Banners, Banners

It did not help anything that during the first Web bubble stocks were based on eyeballs, not profits. That meant that people were busy trying to buy any type of exposure they could, which ended up making it exceptionally profitable to spam search engines to show off topic random banners on websites.

The Bubble Burst

The Internet bubble burst. What caused such a fast economic recovery was the shift from selling untargeted ad impressions to selling targeted leads. This meant that webmasters lost much of their incentive for trying to get any kind of traffic they could. Suddenly it made far greater sense to try to get niche-targeted traffic.

In 1998, Overture pioneered the pay-per-click business model that most all major search engines rely on. Google AdWords enhanced the model by adding a few more variables to the equation—the most important one is factoring ad click-through rate (CTR) into the ad ranking algorithm.

Google extended the targeted advertisement marketing by delivering relevant contextual advertisements on publisher websites via the Google AdSense program.

More and more ad spending is coming online because it is easy to track the return on investment. As search algorithms continue to improve, the value of having well-cited, original, useful content increases daily.

Advancing Search Technology

Instead of relying exclusively on page titles and meta tags, search engine now index the entire page contents. Since search engines have been able to view entire pages, the hidden inputs (such as meta tags) have lost much of their importance in relevancy algorithms.

The best way for search engines to provide relevant results is to emulate a user and rank the page based on the same things the user see and do (Do users like this website? Do they quickly hit the back button?), and what other people are saying about the document (For example, does anybody link to this page or site? Who is linking at it? What is the link text? And so on.).