If you pay any attention to the SEO world and the forums, blogs and articles written about text link advertising, you will know what a hot topic this has become. We were able to pay a visit to the recent SES (Search Engine Strategies) Expo in Chicago and the topic had a few sessions that were focused around it. Matter of fact, one of the sessions was a Q & A with representatives from Google, Yahoo & MSN. While there were some great questions, the answers from the reps were good and not so good. What I mean by this is, some answers provided were helpful in response to the questions, however, other answers were just wasted breath and time. In other words, they didn’t want to give out too much information to protect their product, which is completely understandable. Of course, with answers, a breeding ground of helpful tips was created I wanted to pass along. 🙂

Of course I want search engine results to be relevant and helpful because I use their search tools as much as the next guy, however, as a business owner, you should have the ability to build effective websites with all the right aspects to gain the edge on your competition. Relying on a search engine to hopefully give you a good listing is just pure hogwash, if I can use that word :), so companies like ours will constantly innovate and keep up with changes in search engine ranking systems. Now we’re not here, by any means at all, to spam or create linking scheme’s to beat their product! So to those who may want to put words in my ‘blog’mouth, make sure you include this part as well. We will continue to help our advertisers build extremely effective link building campaigns, as well as optimizing their site to make it as search engine friendly as it can be. There are right and wrong ways to do this and we are very careful to do everything the right way. So with that being said, lets move on to this little tutorial on this post.

1. Building Your Text Ads

Tip #1:
Do not use the same anchor text on every link you acquire! For one, you are limiting yourself to that one keyword or key phrase. Natural search engine listings have a certain keyword that you should pay attention to; NATURAL. What you need to do is make your text linking campaign look as natural as possible. Use as many variations of the anchor text you want to push. Examples would be: (text link, text links, text link advertising, buy text links, sell text links, text ads, text ad link . . .). So create many different ads to use and put a limit to how many times a given text ad will be placed and make that number 10 or less.

Tip #2:
Use variations of the url placed with each text ad. So instead of pointing all of your text ads to your home page, mix things up and point them to internal pages of your site. Preferably, make each text ad about the page the user will be directed to. So with our anchor text examples in Tip #1, build a text ad with the anchor text of buy text links and instead of linking it directly to the home page, link it to an internal page that actually talks about buying text links. Then build a new ad with the term sell links and point it to a different internal page that talks about selling of text links. This will allow your entire site to become popular instead of just your homepage. This also is a very natural way of linking, which is important.

Tip #3:
Consider using some text ads with the WWW and some text ads without it. (www.linkworth.com and linkworth.com). Search engines actually give different ranking to both versions of this url. One way to really test this is if you have the Google toolbar, open your homepage with the WWW, notice your PageRank, then remove the WWW and refresh to notice your new PageRank. Feel free to click the links to our home page and notice the different rankings of our own.

Tip #4:
Create catchy descriptions for each text ad that a user interested in your service would want to see. Of course, not all partners accept descriptions, but it’s still a wise idea to make your description something you would read and want to hear. What this means is, do not fill your description up with keywords! Remember, the key to everything you do in search engine marketing (SEM) is to bring traffic to your site that is interested in what you have to offer. If our customer type was on a site and read our text ad, tell me which text ad you think would be more attractive to bring a potential paying client:

A: Buy Text AdsLinkWorth offers link buying strategies to increase your visibility and shoot your traffic through the roof with targeted customers.
or
B: Buy Text Adsbuy ads, text links, text ads, text link, text ad, buy text links online, buy online links, get links, link popularity, increase link popularity.

I think you can see which description looks a little more appetizing to a potential paying customer. So take time to create extremely effective descriptions so not only will you build your linking reputation, but your CTR (click through ratio) will be much higher.

2. Selecting New Partners to Link From

Tip #1:
Relevancy is as important as ever these days, so when selecting partners to acquire a link from, stick with sites that are similar to your own in content and theme. As stated previously, your primary goal is to acquire more traffic, so you are much more likely to get new customers from a partner site that has something to do with what you are promoting or selling. It’s unlikely that a person on a car dealership site is looking to buy a text link ad, so it wouldn’t make much sense to place our link on hummer.com.

Tip #2:
Consider indirect relationships as well. There are MANY situations where a text link might fit on a site that isn’t necessarily the same content or theme. Products can compliment each other and might meet the users desire based on what they are looking for. For example, a website that sells GLOVES, isn’t necessarily relevant to cars, but some drivers enjoy to wear driving gloves, so in this case a text link ad for gloves would indirectly match well with hummer.com. So stay relevant but do not limit yourself to only your theme because there are many situations you could associate your product with on non relevant sites.

Tip #3:
Add your links slowly to partner sites. Remember the term we referenced earlier? NATURAL. Acquiring several hundred or several thousand links overnight or in a very short period is an obvious flag to search engines. Remember also, we’re not doing things to scheme or spam the search engines, we’re doing this to build your traffic and visibility on other similar sites. Linking is a very important part of ranking your website well, so it’s something that has to be done, just make sure you do it in a natural and non-spammy fashion. So consider adding like 5 to 10 to 15 links “throughout” an entire week. Not all at once, spread them out through the week. There is really no limit as long as you do things in a slow and natural methodic fashion. One thing which was mentioned was to look at your competition and see how many links they have, but that is such a ridiculous comment it makes me laugh. No one, not even Google, can honestly and truthfully say there is a limit to the number of links any given website can receive based on their competition. Site A could be a very useful and popular website with Site B and Site C being worthless and not worthy of mentioning by anyone. So be smart, but don’t limit yourself either.

3. Tricks & Secrets of the Above Mentioned

T&S #1:
Alternating Anchor Text Secret – If you want to buy an “ALL PAGES” text link on a large website, don’t use the same ad because it will be the same thing shown on every page. Again, back to your main goal, you want to optimize your ability to grab users to visit your site, so you want to appeal to anyone and everyone that might be on any given page of that website. How would you do this? We call it our Rotating Link Ads and it gives you the option of showing a different anchor text on every page. We are soon going to offer unique url’s for each anchor text as well, so it will give you the opportunity to show a unique anchor text and url, whether it is to your homepage or an internal page, for every page view. IMHO it’s the only way anyone should be buying all pages text links now. The important thing is the main domain url does not change, only the landing page of a given domain. Currently you list all of the keywords and/or key phrases you wish to use on the ad and it will rotate these on each page view. So it turns into a stat-namic (static + dynamic) link. The CTR of these on all pages links have been so much higher than using the same text ad on every page of a site.

T&S #2:
Creating Relevancy Secret – Some partner sites might be seesawing back and forth on being relevant or not relevant. It’s a great site and you want to link from it, however, you also don’t want to hurt yourself. Well why not make this site relevant? How would you do this? We call this our Billboard Link Ads and as the true pioneer to this product, we cannot begin to tell you the effectiveness this product can give any text linking campaign. Not only do you get your own entire page to talk about your product or service, but you get to plant content links throughout the content that you write. You write an entire page of content, then the partner places this page on their site and link to your page from their site. You can make the site a mirror image of their site or create your own look and feel. It’s a sort of in-between text ad that resides on the partner’s website. Most importantly, you give relevance to that website and create a given relationship between their site and your own. It’s one of our favorite products due to the CTR and the ability to say as much as you want about a given product or service on other websites.

These tips, tricks and secrets are many things we have practiced here for quite some time and some that have just recently been executed with much success. Nothing we suggest goes without our own testing and practicing, so know that these tips are not just guesses. Link building is the heart of any SEO company whether they will admit it or not, although optimization of a site is also very important. The optimization part of it we like to call their diversion of what really goes on. Of course I’m generalizing right now, because there are many very good SEO guys out there, as we have links to many of them on this blog, but there are also some big SEO firms that have a lot of smoke clouds circling their practices. I just hope this tips and tricks post can help a few of you out there. 😉