Archive for September, 2007
Your site’s links are becoming more important than ever as the SEO world continues to grow in both depth and competition. However, the most detrimental thing you can do to your site is to haphazardly choose links that direct traffic in and out of your site.
So you want your page to rank high in the search engines- don’t we all? Well like many things in life, getting what you want takes some work. In the SEO business, link building tends to be the most meticulous part of the process. But suck it up; we all have to do it.
“Are Paid Links Evil?” That was the controversial question debated at a propaganda-filled panel discussion at this year’s SES San Jose Conference. One argument, endorsed by the big-gun search engines such as Google, asserts that paid links are akin to manipulation, causing a negative impact on search credibility and generally muddying the already murky waters of the web. On the other side of the aisle is the Pro-Paid Link contingent, sprouting the ideals of competitive market, fairness, anti-hypocrisy, and relevancy. The panel for this discussion included:
Many newbie webmasters have been scared off by the misinformation about text link advertising put out by Google “SEO Spokesman” Matt Cutts. Unfortunately, many of these webmasters will never have their websites ranked because no links means no ranking. It is pretty sad, all the great sites that will never be found because of an irrational fear of promoting websites properly.
Ironically, at the San Jose SES conference, while Matt Cutts delivered his “Paid Links are Evil” presentation, major link buys were taking place on the trade show floor. Scoffing at Mr. Cutts sales pitch, major SEOs and Internet Marketing companies were in an absolute link buying feeding frenzy. Footer, sidebar, or irrelevant links - it did not matter - if you had 1,000s of text links for sale, you had more buyers than you could handle at SES.
I guarantee, if paid links were not an effective form of advertising these major firms would not be wasting their time and money with paid text link advertising.
Contextual Links were a especially hot commodity as more SEO experts are coming to realize that they can get the biggest boost from natural links in content. Often, as the other trade show booths were empty, the LinkXL booth had a long line of interested attendees – many in line were in the market for as many quality contextual text links as we could sell them.
We are excited to be at the forefront of this new evolution in paid link advertising. In just a few short days we validated that “natural links in content” will soon be one of the most popular forms of text link adverting on the web.