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Benefits of Text AdsText Ads offer a few significant benefits over image ads, but those advantages are eliminated or equalized in some situations. Text ads have the most benefit when they can be read by search engines. Image banners and buttons hold the allure of being attractive. When done right, they can draw as many clicks as text ads, but statistically, text ads usually get more clickthroughs than image ads do. Most business owners prefer image ads though. Search engines can index text ads better than image ads also. You can put in an alt tag to help to reduce this issue, but not all search engines pay attention to alt tags. An image ad ends up being the equivalent of a plain link, with no text near it, whereas a text ad gets the benefit of anchor text, as well as the nearby words. Anchor text is the text that your URL is embedded into - the part of the ad that is clickable. Search engines assume that the words in the link, are what the link is about - they also consider other nearby words. This gives a text link far more power with search engines to increase your pagerank, and to increase search relevancy for specific keywords. Text ads can be produced in the following ways: 1. A context link - it does not look like an ad at all, it appears to be just a link within an article. 2. Plain text - Just a simple ad that looks like a paragraph on the page. 3. Formatted text - You can use colors and text sizes to make the ad stand out more. 4. Boxed ads - Text ads can be put into a colored or bordered container, to further make them stand apart. Search engine benefits of text ads are not affected by which of those methods you use, except that they DO pay more attention to bolded or formatted items. The real issue with search engines and text ads comes in with the type of coding the ad site uses. Many site owners use coding in ad placements which eliminates the search engine benefits - most commonly, a script which redirects the URL (they use this for tracking clicks - if the ad site tracks clicks for you, they are using a script). Search engines do not pay attention to them when the URL is in a script. Some site owners will also use a "nofollow" tag, which tells the search engines to ignore the link. It can be hard to tell when you are getting an ad that actually gives you all the benefits possible. Some search engines frown on the practice of purchasing ads to help pagerank, so advertisers cannot openly state that they offer ads that give you pagerank benefits - to do so is to court a negative response in your own ratings. So the most they can say is that they offer "static HTML links", which means, they do not use a script. You will have to ask them through email or other contact about whether or not they use a "nofollow" tag. These issues apply if you choose to offer paid advertising on your own site also. You'll need to make sure that the value you offer is worth the price you are asking. Ad rates on new sites are typically very low, so don't feel like you can charge even $5 a month for an ad on your site unless you have extremely good traffic and pagerank yourself. Written by Laura Wheeler |
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