Tactics for Using Lowly Text Link Ads

Text link ads are considered ephemera by online advertisers. These tiny underlined generic words crammed into out-of-the-way ghettos at the end of right or left columns on large sites are easily ignored.

Sold by jobbers like www.text-links-ads.com to entrepreneurs and small companies, you can find them in out of the way corners of big traffic sites like NY Dailynews.com, CNET.com, Internet.com, Forbes.com and others whose publishers are happy to take the money and run.

Yet according to LinkExperts.com these little puppies are both the poor man’s entry to big-time traffic and a stealth technique to improve natural search results.

Being on high volume sites, these tiny links are on Main Street, though not in prominent positions. But all things being equal, marginal brands and direct marketers will get occasional clicks; probably as many as purchased key words might yield. Pricing can be parsed and predictable, like on Google, with comparable results based on volume and investments.

But the bigger value, say the text link savants, comes from the fact that the code underlying these ads makes a direct connection between the big sites and the guppy sites. So when search engine spiders survey the situation they credit the little guys with serious incoming links which, over time, boosts their natural search ranking on Google, Yahoo and Overture. For the spiders these obscure links are silent digital votes of confidence which shuffle the natural search rankings.

The resulting added traffic more than justifies the throw-away costs of the text links because it drives business directly to marketers’ sites. Evidently there are peddlers of insurance, business cards, gadgets, printing, and an array of products claiming positive ROI from this tactic even though it’s hard to believe that this will remain under the radar for long.