Text Link Ads

In years past general article submissions to sites like EzineArticles was a great strategy, but in early 2008 Google stripped the ability of many of the article banks from being able to pass PageRank, so the upside of writing articles for generic general article banks is fairly limited unless the strategy is used in conjunction with other link building strategies.

More recently some hub based websites (like Squidoo, HubPages, and Work.com) have launched accepting how to guides from topical experts. It is easy to get published on these sites. Some of them use rel=nofollow on outbound links for new publishers, but as you gain experience and trust in their algorithms those limitations typically get lifted.

Some bloggers have thousands of readers, and through buying a lot of ads on blogs you could hope to tap some of that traffic flow. But what if there was a cheaper and more effective way of borrowing their traffic? There is. Guest posts!

The essense of guest posts is you find related popular blogs and follow them for a while. Then after you understand their editorial style and direction, and have participated in the community for a while you can ask if you could write a guest article for their site. The beauty of this strategy is that you not only get a quality low risk link, but you also get to appear in front of hundreds or thousands of subscribers who read that site.

In an ideal world, as a merchant you would like your commercial offer pages to rank for your best keywords. Unfortunately people are more likely to link to your informational pages, and in some cases those pages may compete with and outrank your commercial offers. So what can you do?

Lots of Linkbait - this strategy revolves around building so much authority that your commercial offer pages still rank even if nobody else links to them…ranking primarily based on domain authority and internal anchor text.

Change URLs - a few weeks after you launch an effective well linked piece of content consider changing that page. Some options:

• Add aggressively placed advertisements on that page, making sure that traffic flow has an opportunity to see your commercial offers.
• Add links to other pages on your site to help flow PageRank to other key pages.
• Make the well linked article a sub-section within that section and turn the well linked to URL into a salesletter.

Internal Redirects
Have a number of pages competing for the same keywords? If they are linked to from other sites consider consolidating the link authority by 301 redirecting the less important pages to the more important associated page.

For example, if you ranked #8 and #11 you might be able to rank #3 or #4 by combining the link juice from those pages.

If 1 is good 2 is better…if 2 is better than 300 is great…or so the strategy goes. In theory that is nice, but that is not how the web works. As the opportunity cost of a marketing strategy decreases then the networks influenced by the technique get better at demoting it.

In May of last year John Scott tested submitting his site to 5 strong paid directories while submitting another site to 700 cheap directories. He shares his results here. And what are they? 5 quality paid directories outperformed 700 cheap directories, and the site with 700 links appeared penalized while the other site got 100+ search engine referrals each day.

Search engines rank pages based on relevancy and authority. As a link buyer you have many ways you can influence both of these.

Relevancy

• Peform keyword research and ensure your primary keywords appear in your page title. Make sure your page copy also includes secondary keywords and important keyword modifiers to help ensure you have the ability to rank for a broad array of related keywords.
• When linking internally try to use your keywords as the anchor text of the links pointing to the most important pages.
• When buying links try to get the keyword you want to rank for in the anchor text.

Authority

• Create and give away valuable tools and featured content, even if they do not lead to direct sales. If a person links at any part of your site it generally helps the rest of your site rank better.
• Link to important pages more frequently than you link to unimportant pages. Link to your most important pages sitewide.
• When buying or building links where you have some control over where they link at, try to point them at the pages you want to rank.