A few days ago, I wrote a post about buying links for search rankings. In that post, I explained how I achieved a first page ranking for a key phrase by purchasing text links through Text-Link-Ads. That, however, is not the smartest way to buy your way into the search results. This article will discuss a few different ways to buy text links, starting with my least favorite and moving along to my most favorite.

What Kinds of Text Links to Buy

Before you can start buying text links, with the hopes of moving up in the natural search results for particular keywords, you need to know what kinds of links to buy. Here are three essential tips to keep in mind when shopping for and ordering text links:

  1. Choose keywords first: Do not buy text links randomly. You won’t be entirely wasting your money (because you will still be building backlinks), but you certainly won’t get the most value out of it. Start by doing some keyword research and choosing keywords that are highly targeted, popular enough, and low to medium difficulty.
  2. Use keywords as anchor text: If you’re trying to rank for certain search terms, you want to buy links that are those search terms. Don’t use your website name or tag line as the anchor text (save that for casual link exchanges), use the actual keyword you are trying to rank for.
  3. Vary your anchor text: Executing a link building campaign for only one set of anchor text can make you an easy target for Google. To combat this, choose a few different keywords that you want to rank for and mix up the anchor text. For example, instead of using “money making advice” for every link, you could also use “advice on making money”. These slight variations make everything seem more natural.
  4. Spread links across multiple domains: Similar to having all you links use the same anchor text, you don’t want all your links to be from the same domain name. It’s become an accepted belief that search engines are devaluing sitewide links, so try to focus on getting one link per domain. Search engines have a much easier time finding artificial sitewide links than they do finding artificial individual links. Convincing a webmaster to give or sell you a single link is also much, much easier than convincing them to give you a sitewide link.
  5. Buy links on thematically similar pages: Search engines look for themes when calculating your ranking. If you are buying “web hosting” text links on a “dog grooming” web page, you aren’t going to get the full benefit. Try to only buy links on websites where it makes sense. This is one area of “search engine manipulation” where it makes sense to play by the rules.

Now that you know some of the characteristics links that a good for purchasing, we will talk about where to find them. There are three major avenues for buying links: brokers, classifieds, and communications.

Buying Text Links Through Brokers

This is the easiest and fastest way to buy keyword rich text links. All you have to do is visit a website like Text-Link-Ads or LinkAdage, browse through their marketplace, add some links to your shopping cart, and checkout. There is some subjectivity here (webmasters can decline your purchase), but all of these websites are actively looking to sell their links so you will have success 99% of the time.

However, while buying links through brokers may be the easiest, it is not the best. I would go as far as to say that it is the least beneficial method for buying text links. Even though you can rank rather well for keywords with them, there is always the chance that Google flags your links and discounts them. Or even worse, they could ban your website for that search term completely. It is usually easy for Google to catch these links because the websites are listed in the brokerage, the links are usually labeled with a “sponsored” heading, and the links don’t have all the characteristics of naturally occurring ones.

In addition to the risks of buying links through brokers, you have to pay high monthly fees. The publishers are only receiving about 50% of what you are paying, which means you are spending at least two times as much as you could be. And this is a charge you have to live with every single month for the entirety of your campaign. Rest assured, if you are willing to put a little effort into this, there are better ways to buy text links.

Buying Text Links Through Classifieds

I really like this method because, just like with a brokerage, it allows you to passively browse links that are for sale, but you can purchase them at highly discounted prices. Here are a few of the best webmaster forums that allow members to buy, sell, and trade text links:

As you can see, there are plenty of listings with people trying to sell text links, but they aren’t without their problems. For one, it is hard to sort through all the extra wording and garbage listings to find what you are really looking for. Many of them are still asking for monthly payments. Second, there isn’t a ton of variety. Unless you want to waste your money buying text links on unrelated web pages, you better hope for a little luck in finding the right linking partners.

Buying Text Links Through Communications

By far, the best way to buy text links is to contact webmasters directly. You can’t count on a 100% success rate, but the success you do find will be well worth it. Many of the people that you contact will either not respond or will respond that they don’t want to sell text links. Here are a few tips for increasing your success rate:

  1. Choose related web sites: Don’t ask someone to link to your web page when it has nothing to do with their site. The people who are money hungry will comply, but you won’t get much benefit. Instead, find web sites with readers that would “benefit” from being sent to your website.
  2. Suggest link placements: Do as much of the work as possible. Once you find a related web site, find the perfect page and the perfect spot on that page for your link. It could be a phrase that already exists within the content or maybe you could slightly reword their content. Whatever the case, send these suggestions along with your purchase request so that the webmaster knows what he/she is agreeing to.
  3. Ease their worries: There is no doubt that Google is trying to scare people. They want to protect their algorithm and so they are telling people that selling links is evil and can get you banned. Maybe in extreme situations, but not with what we are doing. Relate to the webmaster, telling them that you only want “natural” links so that you don’t get in trouble with the search engines.
  4. Offer a fair price: Placing a link takes time and provides value. You should reward the webmasters for their service by offering a fair price. Don’t be silly and try to buy links for $1; you’ll probably just end up insulting them.
  5. Suggest multiple payment methods: The most common form of payment will be PayPal, but also offer to accommodate them with other means. You could use Google Checkout, any one of the smaller online payment processors, or even a money order via snail mail.

But getting webmasters to agree to sell their links is only half the battle. You also want to get the most bang for your buck. Here are some additional tips to stretch your advertising dollars further:

  1. Never buy monthly links: Buying monthly links might be acceptable through a broker because they manage all of the payments. But honestly, do you want to be responsible for renewing your scattered text links manually? I didn’t think so.
  2. Always buy permanent links: The opposite of never buying monthly links is to always buy permanant links. The main benefit here is that your monthly cost goes infinitely down. If you pay $15 for a permanant link, it will work out to just over $1/month after a year and $0.63/month after two years.
  3. Find pages with potential: Everyone knows about Google PageRank and everyone knows it holds value. What everyone doesn’t know, however, is that pages can have PageRank before it’s exported to the toolbar. Buy links on “PR0″ pages that you know are actually higher. Depending on the skill level of the other webmaster, you could even emphasize the fact that it’s a “PR0″ link. A great way to estimate the PR of a page is to see which “page links” it has with the SEO for FireFox extension.

Finally, after you have purchased a text link, there are a few things you should remember to do. First of all, keep track of your contacts, your successes, and your total spending. Also, monitor all of your key phrases to determine which ones need more inbound links, which ones are flops, and which ones were successful. You should also send a follow-up email to the webmaster, thanking them for the transaction and asking if they have any other similar websites or know any other webmasters with similar sites.

Link Buying Recap

Buying text links can be your ticket to search engine rankings, but make sure you do it properly. Always keep yourself under the radar and monitor your results. You don’t want to buy your way into search rankings with a page that doesn’t convert and you don’t want to waste your money on a key phrase that is simply too competitive.

If done properly, and used in combination with a high converting landing page, link buying can provide you with some of the highest ROIs you’ve ever seen.

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