Why buy text link ads
Date Written on 07/3/2004Article Written by: Albert Ghergich
http://www.seoptimizational.com Staff
Copyright 2008 All Rights Reserved
The second major benefit of buying text link ads is the boost you will get in the search engine rankings. When you visit www.google.com and do a search for computers Google looks at every page in its database and runs a ranking algorithm to decide which website ranks number one and which website ranks last. A search for “computers” on Google reveals 62,900,000 results. You can see this by looking up at the top right of the search bar when you are surfing on Google. Try searching for almost any subject on Google; you will be surprised at how many pages of information are listed for even obscure topics. A search for “red pogo ball” reveals over 36,000 results. With all of these pages how can your website out rank the competition?
Text links boost your websites rankings in Google, Yahoo, and MSN search engines. For example, visit Google and type in the word “exit” and hit enter. Yahoo is ranked number one followed by Disney. These two websites never mention the word exit on their webpage. The reason they are ranking so highly is because of the porn industry. No this isn’t a Disney sponsor’s porn rumor. The internet porn industry usually has an option to exit a web page before you access adult material. If you click exit a lot of the sites are linking to safe sites like Yahoo and Disney. So they both rank number one and two for a term “exit”, but that word is never mentioned on their page. Try a Google search for “miserable failure” and the number one result is the biography of President George W. Bush. Why would George Bush’s biography come up for that search? Maybe it’s because Al Gore invented the internet and has it out for Mr. Bush. However, if you were to check the text links that point to George Bush’s biography you would find that enough people decided to link to that page with the text link phrase “miserable failure.” A simple search command to check links in Google is “link:www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html”, just change the website to the exact page that you want to check links for. Towards the bottom of the first page you will see a website http://www.privatehand.com/flash/xmas.html click on it and notice the link text at the bottom of the page reads “miserable failure” and points to Bush’s biography. If you continue down the list you will see more and more sites doing this, all in an attempt to rank that website for that particular phrase.
I interviewed Dan Shenck owner of www.locatemodels.com and asked about his experience with online advertising. He explained that a few years ago he had created a website that host modeling portfolios on the internet. The only problem was that not enough people were visiting his modeling site. So Dan put all of Locate Models’ remaining money into banner advertising. Dan went on to explain that the problem with this is that most companies that sell banner advertisements charge you every time your banner ad is viewed on a webpage. You are billed on a per impression basis. Dan did get models to sign up for his website through banner ads but in the end the cost was too high and he had to close down the site. Dan said that he had to pay every time his banner was shown and not when it was clicked. “If my banner ad was shown 10,000 times I had to pay for every single time even if the ad was only clicked once.” Luckily Dan has gotten enough investors together to bring his modeling website back online for another run, only this time with a better understanding of internet advertising.
