Text link advertising is one of the most pervasive modes of advertising on the Internet. Yet while text advertising is so popular, its results are questionable. Generally speaking, there are two types of text link advertising: one kind will seek to drive web traffic to a certain product or service that is for sale via the ‘Net, while the other kind will simply seek to get web surfers to visit a certain site, which may or may not contain some kind of product or service for sale.

Text link advertising for the sake of the latter is usually only effective when it uses specific keywords that will be of interest to those who visited the site in the first place, or if it points to a site that covers a niche on the web, which otherwise might be hard to find. Occasionally, it pays to have the kind of link advertising that actually uses words that stand in direct opposition to those used on the referring site, simply to catch the visitor’s eye and arouse the curiosity.

Text link advertising for products is a lot harder. After all, how can you advertise your product without a picture in four words or less? Sure, if you are selling a brand name, you can simply use the name and the word “cheap” behind it, and you might get some hits, but generally speaking this kind of text link advertising is extremely hard and may not yield the results you are hoping for.

Some have gone so far as to sign up for free text advertising with questionable sites that are virtually overrun by text advertising and semiotics which add cute little symbols to their ads, but other than that have very little commercial value. Quite possibly the best way to treat link ads is to exercise as much control over their placement as possible.

While most webmasters will place them at the bottom of a page or on a designated page that rarely if ever sees any traffic, it is better to have the link included on the upper half of the main website, and also have it included in meaningful text rather than all by itself off to the right or left. When people surf the web, they do it for content, not for ad pages, and thus the approach of placing the link inside a meaningful article has shown to yield appreciable results.