One of the most powerful external SEO techniques revolves around building text link advertisements for keyword phrases. Considered by many as the end all solution to SEO, because of this text links are the most misunderstood part of SEO.

Part of the reason for the misconception about text link ads is because website’s that in the past targeted massive amounts of text link ads won the race. However, with Google cracking down on black hat SEO things have changed a lot.

About 5 years ago, text link ads became such a focal point to SEO that a company called TextLinkAds.com came on the scene offering webmasters a much higher payout option than Google Adsense by letting website owners choose the price of a link and sell their ads.

Google’s response was aggravating to most and certainly changed the Google SEO game a ton. Google decided to act as a buyer of text link ads and blacklisted all websites doing business with TLA. Their reasoning presumably was that an uncontrolled environment where links are sold to buyers without filters was black hat SEO.

With all things considered, text link ads obviously do help SEO websites when used properly. This includes choosing the right keyword phrase for your text link ads as well as the proper title tags for those links. Also, inherently text link ads are an SEO influence on websites because of their role in the Google Pagerank algorithm. The higher Pagerank websites that you get the link from the better.

In my opinion the most ignored aspect of text link ads is website placement. Black Hat SEOs are partially to blame for this, but webmasters and website owners are equally if not more to blame than black hats. Here’s my reasoning. Website’s that already rank for the keywords that you’re trying to rank for serve a dual purpose. For one, they’re a higher quality link so the SEO is better. Secondly, the cross-promotion from a relevant site offers conversion possibilities as well as SEO benefits.

Here’s an example. Say an SEO Firm wanted to rank really well for Google SEO. They see that I rank number one for that search phrase and so they approach me with an advertising deal. On one hand, they will be very successful with the link they receive from me because of relevancy. However on the other hand, that same SEO Firm that sells SEO Services might actually get real SEO leads as well as SEO benefits, which becomes even more leads…

Ahh, the power of Google Search Engine Optimization …