To Eleven Marketing

Text Link advertising is a form of web site advertising with some popularity these last few years. Generally this involves “hard-coding” text link ads on high traffic, here in the hopes that this will improve your own search engine ranking, which will then result in more visitors to your web site. As the popularity of this form of advertising grew, businesses launched services to manage this for you, by setting up partnerships with many high traffic sites, then they sell you text links on their “network” of sites and they keep a percentage of the monthly fee.

This advertising stems from the fact that many search engines look at web sites that have a lot of other sites linking to their site as a credible form of evaluating the sites popularity. Of course, that’s not what is happening here. These sites are not linking to you because they think your site has content with value or that it’s popular, but because you are paying them to. Hence, the problem with this form of advertising, you are trying to cheat with your web site, in effect, get a higher ranking on the search engines than your site merits. What merits a good ranking? Content, both in quality and quantity. Your downfall of course is that if you had good content, in quantity and of quality, you likely wouldn’t need to be doing text link ads to begin with.

Purchasing text link ads on high traffic sites in the hopes that it will increase your own ranking is not the best use for your limited advertising dollars. Especially since this form of advertising generates very limited returns. This is how it works: Major search engines such as Google and Yahoo use specific algorithms to rank web sites. Search placement agencies figure out how the majors are ranking sites and then sell their services of improving your web site ranking on the major search engines, such as text link advertising on high traffic web sites. Of course, this is not sanctioned by the search engines themselves, as you are trying to fool them, which makes them less accurate. So what do they do? Change their algorithms, which makes the advertising you are doing completely worthless. So now you have to start over again with something different. And the cycle goes on and on and on. There is also a chance you could actually hurt your ranking, when you overdo it and a search engine notices you are trying to trick them .The search placement agencies don’t care about this because this means you will never leave as a customer, and they continue to make money. Some clues that they are not acting in your best interest and offering services with real “value”? I read on one paid placement web site a line that tries to sell you on their service: “search engine optimization, which every website needs for optimal search engine listings”. When the name of the service is defined by repeating the name of the service but rearranging the order of the words, then my guess is that the provider of that service is having a hard time coming up with any real value. One thing you will notice on all of these text link agencies is that they make no guarantee that your ranking will improve, and they readily admit search engines change their requirements from time to time (and without informing your agency of when or what the new rankings depend on).

So should you never invest in text link ads to try to improve your ranking? I would say do so as a last effort because you have everything else covered and still have advertising dollars left that you can’t find anything else to do with. We’ll assume since you’re doing text links you don’t have good content. The result? When you stop buying text links your results will go away. So unless you can afford to buy text link ads forever the benefit you are buying will not last. How long does it take to see results? At a minimum three to six months, but it could be longer.

Advertising should be an investment, not merely an expense. So instead of this endless cycle that gets you nowhere, take these same resources and invest in content. Content is an investment. It provides return in both the short and long term. It lasts forever. The money you spend on text links that last a month could be used to generate content that stays on your site as long as you own the site. Regardless of how the search engines change their formula, one thing never changes, that is that the sites with the most content or most relevant content get ranked higher than those with less. Search engines that cannot manage this will not stay around, since that is the one element their users demand: relevant search results.

Another reason to invest in content over text links is that it supports the basic marketing philosophy of satisfying customers’ needs. Potential customers visit your web site searching for content. If you invest in search engine ranking without content you disappoint them, and they are that much less likely to return or do business with you.. Even the idea that your products for sale count as content is only semi-plausible. One of the great successes of the Internet is it has made huge amount of information available to the general public, and traffic has grown so dramatically because consumers want this information. To plan to be successful in selling products online without having the corresponding information to go with it will never succeed in the long run, consumers are more informed now than ever. Consumers are demanding more before purchasing. Depth and breadth of content give consumers a reason to come back to your web site more frequently, and this builds brand loyalty, which is an incredible asset for your business.

This should make sense to you. If not, consider the high traffic sites you are buying text link ads on. How many do you think got to be high traffic sites from buying text links on other sites and how many got to be high traffic sites from their content? My guess is that the score is content 100%, text link ads zero.