You have no doubt seen the commercials from credit card company Capital One where they use the phrase, “What’s in your wallet?” A recent post of almost the same title by Debra Mastaler has her talking about paid links, link bait, tagging and article writing.
She first visits the fact that the link buying zeal of last year has kind of of died out.
“The zeal to buy links probably died somewhere between being told by a Google rep they were ‘bad’ and paying exorbitant link fees. Not only did we hear the warnings not to buy them, we read about their evilness on a blog… It was enough scary apathy to make us look for the next big ‘link thing’ and follow the herd to the current buzz.”
So are paid links now a bad thing? Debra doesn’t think so.
“Before we go on, two things. First, I don’t want to get into the ‘link buying is link manipulation which is against the code of the engines’ discussion. No thanks. To me this is nothing more than an advertising tactic that supports an ongoing SEO and marketing strategy which by all ‘normal’ accounts – is acceptable.”
She does advise us make sure you get exactly what you want when buying links whether you want a clean html link, a tracking code and I’ll ad my own – actual traffic from the link.
She then goes on to provide some additional link building tactics including getting links from Chamber or Retail Associations, local business web sites that your customers might visit and buying links in niche and article directories.
Some final advice about buying links:
“Don’t agree to buy space on a page that hosts the words ‘sponsored links’ or wants to add you to the very bottom of the page along with a number of other links. Both of these issues will probably get your link ignored (by the engines) and can be a waste of money.”
Debra is a leading expert on link building and uses a common sense approach by combining traditional sales and promotional strategies with effective online search engine marketing tactics. You can catch Debra live at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies conference in New York where she will be speaking four times.
