Should You Buy Text Ad Links?

Most everyone has heard of banner ads and pay-per-click ads, but what about text ads?

Just as the name implies, text ads are advertisements that you purchase and place on third party websites that link to your site.  These ads are text only (no images) and you typically pay a monthly fee for the ad space.  These are not reciprocal links, they are one-way links into your website.

Quick Review of the Benefits of Incoming Links

High quality incoming links to your website are viewed by the Search Engines as an unbiased vote for your site.  This vote will increase in relevancy if the link comes from a website that is thematically related to yours.

The more relevant incoming links to your website, the higher your link popularity will become.  This is especially important to your natural (organic or free) search engine rankings.  Google places a lot of emphasis on link popularity when they rank websites.

When obtaining links to your site, you should keep these two factors in mind:

1. Linking from quality (thematically related) websites.
2. Using your main keyword phrases in the anchor text.

Advantages of Text Ads

1. By placing text ads on thematically related websites, you can increase targeted traffic to your site.
2. Gaining links from websites that are related can dramatically increase your site's link popularity.
3. You can typically control the anchor text in the link, thereby giving you the opportunity to use your best keyword phrases.
4. You can increase the number of links into your website, making your site appear more popular to Search Engines.
5. You can purchase what are called site-wide (or run-of-the-site) ads.  These ads will appear on every page of the referring website, often at substantial discounts.

Tips on Buying Text Ad Links

Purchase text ads only from websites that are relevant to your website.  Don't go for the higher PageRank pages thinking that will automatically increase the value of that link.

Vary the anchor text used in the link.  It will look unnatural if all of your links, paid advertisements and free links, use the same anchor text.  Search Engines are getting smarter every day.  You run the risk of being penalized if the vast majority of your incoming links use the same keyword phrases.

Link to different pages on your website.  Again it will look more natural if incoming links direct visitors to different pages on your site.

Buy your text ads from web pages that limit the number of outgoing links.  Each page has only so much voting power (PageRank).  The PageRank of the page is divided equally by the number of outgoing links.  Plus the smaller number of outgoing links, the better chance you have of a prospect clicking on the link.

Be patient.  Acquiring incoming links and having them count towards increasing your site's rankings will take some time.  It's not unusual to see your rankings increase after several months have passed.  You should evaluate this strategy over the course of six months to a year.  Often times you can get a discounted price on your ads if you buy them for longer periods of time.