» Buying Text Links For SEO or For Traffic?

The buying and selling of text link ads is nothing new although the popularity of this practice has grown over the last couple of years. With companies like text-link-ads.com providing an easy marketplace to buy and sell links there has been an even bigger surge of link buying especially in the blogging community. Before you jump into the link buying game, make sure you know what your goals are or else you might not get the results you expected. This post will provide some valuable information to help steer you in the right direction and if you’ve never purchased a text link before I have an offer at the end to help you get started.

Buying Text Links for SEO
Buying a text link on a popular website or blog for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes is one of the main reasons there is even a marketplace for this. Webmasters and bloggers purchase text links with specific anchor text corresponding with the terms they are aiming to rank well for.

For example, if you own a website that sells dog food you may already rank well for many keywords to drive traffic to your site but ranking high for a keyword like “pet supplies” would give you a much bigger boost in traffic, and ultimately a big boost in sales. The problem is, the “pet supplies” keyword is a very popular search term and may have much more competition than “dog supplies” or “dog supply store” which are more targeted.

So your first instinct may be to search in the marketplace at text-link-ads.com for any pet related websites and purchase a bunch of site wide links on a few of the popular ones. You prefer site wide because that means your link will be on every page and thus will provide more links to your website or blog, perfect right? WRONG! By purchasing a site wide link, you’ll suddenly have a large influx of inbound links. This may sound great but the search engines all employ algorithms to monitor for irregular activity. There are a few reasons a site would suddenly receive thousands of links including:

Site just published some major exclusive news and everyone is linking to it
Site launched a huge spam campaign to build links
Link is part of a site-wide navigation or “sponsored links” listing

Since all these links come from the same site, the search engines will know its not the first reason. #2 and #3 are listed as big no-nos in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. At this point in the game, the value of the links you just purchased immediately diminishes as the search engines determine the links are artificial, meaning they are not natural links that should be counted. Basically, the links will provide no real value when it comes to search engine optimization. What you should do is simply purchase a single text link with your the anchor text of your choice and point it to your website. This single link to your website will be counted and will help in improving your Google PageRank.

Buying Text Links For Traffic
While buying text links for SEO does eventually lead to increased traffic, some webmasters and bloggers choose to purchase text links for traffic and do not care about search engine optimization. This type of link purchasing strategy is excellent for temporary websites that need to amass traffic as quickly as possible. Examples of sites that would benefit real well from this would be any website that is not going to be around for more than 3 - 6 months. It could be a pre-launch hype building website, or a one-time newsletter signup spree website, etc. The key thing is that the website may not be around for long. If the website is expected to be run indefinitely, then it would not make sense to buy text links for traffic.

It would be better to purchase them for SEO purposes to rank well for the search terms you are targetting which will bring in a lot more traffic in the long run. Using SEO tricks to optimize for a keyword phrase will affect many related search terms as well bringing in search traffic from what is sometimes referred to as the long tail. I mentioned long tail search term traffic when discussing another SEO trick that works very well so you may want to read that post after this.

Give it a Try Right Now
If you have never purchased text links before and you run a website, here is your chance to give it a try. Text Link Ads is offering new clients with $100 for free to try out the text link ads system. If you don’t like the results, you have no obligation to spend any money, just limit yourself to the $100 they give you. For best results, purchase multiple text links with the same short anchor text and run it for several months so the search engines all index the links. Text Link Ads has an online tool for you to check your inbound link results to make sure the campaigns are working for you.

To sign-up for the free $100 in text links, click here. Good luck, and feel free to share your results with me!

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