Link Trading Myths Uncovered - page 3

by Al Bert, 8/17/2007

Hosted Marketing Pages

A variation on the theme coming into fashion is Hosted Marketing Pages also known as Content Hosting or Pre-sell Pages. In this method you arrange with the site that you want a link from, to have a highly optimized, timely and relevant article that you provide, hosted on that site for a fee. You of course will have embedded all the relevant links in appropriate content that you control. Its main advantage is to allow you to advertise more links than a straight link trade, and with links that rate more highly in SE algorithms for relevance. On the other hand you lose out on PR because the article would most likely be on a brand new page, and anyway you don't want your material competing with other similar editorials. Hosted marketing pages will I believe replace reciprocal linking as the leading SEO technique, especially to establish new sites.

HMP's are one way of paying to syndicate articles relevant to your web site or page. Paid article syndication is not a new SEO method, but as part of a link trading strategy, it takes on a new dimension. Like with HMP's you would distribute optimized articles, in order to acquire inbound links to your site. One can either issue press releases through agencies like PR Web, or have article directories do so. Either way you would pay for prioritization and for wider reach. Just as with HMP's apart from the exposure your site gets, you retain control of your links' anchor text. According to research conducted by the Marketing Experiments Journal, paid press release distribution has for traffic generation purposes, a better ROI than traditional PPC, with an added SEO benefit. (http://www.marketingexperiments.com/see/1122).

Link Trading or Link Renting differs from straight advertising in having an SEO focus that in the longer term obtains more valuable organic traffic from high SE rankings than the direct traffic generated by PPC or any other type of advertising. The latter is only effective for as long as you are shelling out money to fund it, and most advertising experiences diminishing returns, whereas an SEO technique like link trading gains momentum from its viral effect such that in time you can curtail the amount of link renting you are doing with only a marginal effect on your SE visibility.

It is debateable whether Link Renting amounts to SERP manipulation. By the reckoning of some, all SEO is just that - Search Engine manipulation. However even the SE's are aware that SEO hones their own search results by forcing webmasters to focus more acutely the type of traffic their sites attract, based on existing search queries and extrapolating for future ones. In a hypothetical world, if all web pages were adequately optimized, even the most incomprehensible search query terms would return relevant and usable results. This is surely the holy grail of Search.

You need to decide before you start researching sites to buy links from just why you want to trade - for traffic or PR. Some research suggests that PPC has better and more controllable returns than Link Renting for traffic conversion (traffic that buys or takes some other specific action). If your aim is to boost your own site's PR, be careful about how much you pay. Tony Simpson of Webpageaddons has written an informatively about this in a two part article. He concludes that you are much safer bidding for link space on the basis of traffic generation than PR. Either way, buying links, if properly executed, enhances the prospects for a new site, and is set to become part of the internet marketing mix for most webmasters.

Happy Link Trading

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Review the latest Link Popularity Management Software. Enhance your productivity with SEO Elite 4.0, the leading Links Popularity tool. Read Jack Humphrey's "Power Linking 2: Evolution" for the latest in effective link strategy.

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